Lolita has been in the news of late, with the release, amid much bullet sweating and lip pursing, of the Adrian Lyne film of the novel (it opens in Boston next week). But the pubescent nymphet of the title is less the subject than the object of Vladimir Nabokov's book. In her 1997 Pulitzer-winning play How I Learned To Drive, Paula Vogel puts Lolita in the front seat. Oh, the Humbert Humbert figure's there too -- a sad Southern nobody teaching his wife's self-consciously voluptuous niece, among other things, to drive. At the American Repertory Theatre, where the disturbingly compassionate, shockingly droll little work is getting its Boston premiere, tutor and titillator are played by Arliss Howard, the explosive George Garga of last season's In the Jungle of Cities, and the tough-lovely film actress Debra Winger, who is Howard's wife.

I admit I was dubious when I learned that the thrice-Oscar-nominated Winger had never been in a play. But she doesn't do badly by Vogel's, the power of which creeps up on you like a car in idle. Winger, memorably freewheeling and sexy in An Officer and a Gentleman, here takes her cue from her character's revelation, as she relives a particularly painful part of her history, that "that day was the last day I lived in my body." Her Li'l Bit -- as the shy, prickly Lolita figure is called -- is an angular tomboy, lacking the prosthetic mammary enhancement some actresses have brought to the role. Howard's Peck, for his part, is a gentle, suffering Carolina boy (at 45, with years of whiskey and the secrets of World War II under his belt) who hardly means to be a predator.

Seeing the play for the second time, I only just got the way in which almost every key image in it is repeated. Like the formative events of the past, they come back to haunt you. Indeed, How I Learned To Drive is no feminist polemic but a strangely workable amalgam of evocative lyricism and cartoon caricature, its Li'l Bit and Peck set against a backdrop of remembered innocence and R-rated Hee Haw.

When Li'l Bit, narrating the piece, recalls the sights and smells of the Maryland landscape "before the malls took over," she is harking back to more than crickets, moonlight, and "the crumbling concrete of U.S. One." Similarly, in the scene in which "Uncle Peck Teaches Cousin Bobby How To Fish," the counsel toward "patience and psychology" refers to hooking "shy, mercurial fish" other than pompano. And when Vogel surrounds her co-conspirators with a cracker-barrel clan of sexually obsessed grotesques, she underlines their mutual need to connect with something sensitive and human. It's a risky balancing act, but one that the playwright -- a fan of balancing acts, whether she's juggling empathy or styles -- manages with aplomb.

Moreover, at ART, under the direction of David Wheeler, she finally gets the production she envisions in the published script, which suggests an audio-visual elaboration on the driver's-ed terminology in which the action is framed, along with some other tricks involving projections. Both the Off Broadway and Trinity Rep stagings eschewed this business, which at ART can get a bit cute, a stage-right screen offering an almost continual barrage of dancing street signs, driving diagrams, verbal jokes, and visual aids. Yet the central notion -- in which the play, coasting mainly in "the reverse gear," uses driving terminology like Brechtian placards -- is ingenious.

More important, though, is the acting, which must serve to draw the audience into some complicity in the sweet, sordid central relationship -- one of need, negotiation, and lines drawn in very slippery sand. ART Institute actors Aysan Çelik, Jonathan Hova, and Kate Wisniewski do breezy work as the "Greek Chorus" who play everyone from the Henry-Miller-hoedown family to taunting middle-school jerklets to a young man the adult Li'l Bit seduces on a bus. The rolling-pin/roll-me-over-in-the-clover character of Grandma is a tough row to hoe, but Çelik, who's stuck with it, is wrenching at the play's climax, when, in baggy dress and pigtails, she's the disembodied voice of Li'l Bit being ambushed by that first, non-negotiated encounter with funny-uncle Peck.

This tricky work depends, however, on its mutually wounding Li'l Bit and Peck. Winger brings to Drive, as she has to her screen roles, a welcome directness; her narrator is resentful but wry, her adolescent awkwardly adorable. And in the motel-room scene where she finally repudiates Peck, she flinches from his desperate touch as if in actual pain. This is not a bravura performance, but it's an honest one. Howard is more at ease on stage, chatting up the audience about the "scent of sand and cypress" (a phrase that twists back to bite you) in the fishing scene while divesting himself of his city raiment. An unlikely, Walter Mittyish predator, he nonetheless sports a silky drawl and silkier sympathy that are enticing. An artfully passive Peck, he captures both the softness of the grass and the snake that's in it.