In the 25 years since Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse first performed Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned To Drive, the name for the disturbing process that we witness being depicted on stage has long since entered widespread usage. If audiences can now readily label what happens as “grooming,” Vogel’s emotionally complex masterwork remains as unsettling, disarmingly funny and as deeply moving as ever.

Parker and Morse, so beautifully playing the roles they originated all those years ago under the same director, Mark Brokaw, fill the larger Broadway stage – the 1997 production was produced Off Broadway – with performances not so much expanded but deepened by time. Parker’s character, in particular, is intensified by the years, as if the burden of her childhood victimization has only grown heavier in middle age, her desire to understand it unabated.

How I Learned To Drive, opening tonight in a first-rate Manhattan Theatre Club...