Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” which Penobscot Theatre opened over the weekend, is a cruise along the very secret and slippery side roads of American family dysfunction. You will be uncomfortable in your seat for this 90-minute fast ride. You will squirm. The scenery will scare you. You will laugh when you know you should scream. And, best of all, you will be totally lost.

The whirling combination of responses has more in common with a roller coaster ride than a driving lesson, but in her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about sexual abuse and the twisted American values that underscore it, Vogel means for you to feel the dreadful collision of victim and villain. In the play, the character Li’l Bit wryly narrates her scrambled memories of childhood in the 1960s, when she was between the ages of 11 and 18 and her Uncle Peck taught her to drive.

It is quickly apparent that while Uncle Peck cares for Li’l Bit as if she were his child, he also uses these times alone to molest her. The sessions in the car shape the play’s central metaphor of power — who’s in the driver’s seat, who’s got the wheel, who can accelerate and put on the brakes.

Vogel, who is head of the play writing program at Brown University, has said she was inspired by “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s classic tale of eroticizing children. In terms of taking on American culture and its sometimes horrific underbelly, Vogel joins ranks here with Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller.

As deftly as any of these masters of American theater, Vogel manages, in some appalling way, to make “How I Learned to Drive” a love story.

Guest director Kathleen Powers, who directed “Cymbeline” at last summer’s Maine Shakespeare Festival, works this production for both its ambiguity and drama. She goes for the laughs — of which there are many — and then shapes scenes with such gentle anguish that your skin turns cold. Powers expertly gets the push me-pull me rhythms, and despite the audience’s sure reaction of mystification to nearly everything that goes on in this play, the final message is about compassion.

There is no real set for this production, only a black-box of an empty stage onto which the five actors wheel scenery. While a voice-over reads from a driving manual, a chorus of actors in a variety of roles, played with uncompromising flexibility by Ron Adams, Collene Frashure and Kate E. Kenney, depicts Li’l Bit’s family life, school days and the elements that create a larger sense of the origins of sexual abuse.

In the lead roles, Amy deLucia (Li’l Bit) and Duncan M. Rogers (Peck) perform with haunting straightforwardness. It would be easy to get politically preachy with these roles, but deLucia and Rogers, both of whom make their local debut in this production, rein in that temptation and focus on their characters as flawed human beings. DeLucia is coquettish and innocent, flattered and scared. Rogers masterfully blurs the lines between his character’s charms and demons, too. And while scenes between the two actors are bewilderingly sweet and chilling, Rogers’ quietly shocking solo about a fishing trip with a young boy utterly reveals the complexities of Peck.

Lynne Chase’s lighting design illuminates the Maryland sun in all its shadows and emphasizes the surreal quality of memory, but other technical aspects of the production keep it from being seamless. Period music that comes in and out is sometimes louder than the actors’ voices, and almost all the female performers speak too softly even for this small theater.

On opening night, the appreciative audience refrained from giving the standing ovation the performance reasonably deserved. It may be, however, that Vogel’s impact affects even that final moment with confusion.

Penobscot Theatre will present “How I Learned to Drive” 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 5 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 21 at 183 Main St. in Bangor. For tickets and information, call 942-3333.