NEW YORK • The morning after a recent rehearsal of "How I Learned to Drive," Elizabeth Reaser looks over a sheet of paper listing the things her director thinks she needs to work on next time.

She sighs and turns over the page.

"I tend to get more than anyone else," she says, sadly. "Notice Norbert doesn't have one of these."

That would be Norbert Leo Butz, the St. Louis native and two-time Tony Award winner of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and "Catch Me if You Can," who is sitting beside Reaser on a couch in the lounge of the hip Second Stage Theatre.

"I offered to pay an extra $100 per note," he jokes.

Reaser and Butz are trying to create as much humor offstage as they tackle a difficult work on stage: Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive," a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that deals with pedophilia, damaged lives and shattered memories.

The play is a darkly bittersweet comedy that tells the story of a Maryland teen, played by Reaser, who is taught to drive — and at the same time is seduced — by her much older uncle, played by Butz. The play returns to New York City for the first time since its world premiere 15 years ago and at a time when child molestation is in the headlines, from Penn State to Syracuse.

"It's obviously topical again," Butz says. "And it's almost a shame that it's topical again. It should never not be topical. It's always been with us. It's always underneath. It's not distinctive to one era or decade or time. That glosses over the epidemic nature of the issue at large."

Reaser, an Emmy Award nominee perhaps best known as the matriarch of the Cullen clan in the "Twilight" films, has been looking for a play to sink her teeth into and says "this is the role of a lifetime."

Butz knows the feeling, saying his own part is great.

"They don't come along often," he says. "You have to just leap at them."

While the play's pedophilia gets the most attention, both actors insist there's much more than just a predator-victim relationship at work here. They stress that the relationship between uncle and niece is hardly black and white.

"For me, it really is a love story," says Reaser, 36. "Obviously, there's transgressions. There are things that happen that are incredibly wrong morally and legally and ethically, but for me it really is a love story."

Butz, 44, is even more forgiving, saying his character's "most distinctive quality is his gentleness, his warmth, his goodness. That's what's actually distinct about him. The fact that he is a man of really intense vices is not particularly interesting to me. It's the two things existing together."

Reaser and Butz have bonded over the chore ahead. Butz admits that self-doubt triggered a panic attack weeks before rehearsals, but his quick friendship with Reaser has proved calming.

"I'm so lucky to have this one here" — he gestures to his couch mate — "because I don't know how I could have done it, specifically with this play. We just got sort of blessed."