Theater Review: ‘Driving Miss Daisy’

Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” is taking audiences on a journey in the latest Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe production. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play has a lot of miles on it. But it’s still going strong. And starts off with a bang.

The year is 1948. Daisy (Carolyn Michel), a 72-year-old Jewish woman living in Atlanta, has just totaled her car—in the driveway. Her son, Boolie (Kraig Swartz), informs her that her driving days are over. Despite Daisy’s protests, he hires his mother a black chauffeur, Hoke (Taurean Blacque). Their road together stretches ahead to 1973. Hoke and Daisy’s long, strange road trip unfolds in a series of vignettes.

Initially, Daisy won’t let Hoke take the wheel. Then Hoke boasts to Boolie that she’s changed her mind. “It only took six days—same time as it took the Lord to make the world.” Hoke gives Daisy a piece of his mind when she won’t let him go to the bathroom on a long trip. When Daisy (a retired schoolteacher) finds out that Hoke can’t read, she diplomatically starts teaching him. After a synagogue bombing, Hoke informs Daisy that the racists responsible treat everyone who isn’t lily-white with equal hatred, Jews and blacks alike. Hoke drives Daisy to a dinner honoring Martin Luther King. As a guilty afterthought, Daisy asks him to join her. Hoke keeps his pride and refuses her patronizing invitation. As the pair put more miles behind them, barriers slowly break down. At the end of the road, Hoke visits Daisy in the nursing home after she has a stroke. He’s too old to drive, so his granddaughter does the honors.

To summarize the summary …

The sharp-tongue Daisy hates the loss of independence. The long-suffering Hoke holds his tongue—until he can’t. The pair start out bickering, but ultimately become fast friends. It’s the classic odd couple dynamic—and it works. Especially with such fine performers.

Michel’s Daisy is a proud, enlightened liberal who thinks she’s above prejudice, but drops lines like “They’re such children” when speaking of black people, and suspects Hoke and the unseen African-American cook of stealing from her. Daisy thinks there’s a right way to do things—hers. Blacque’s good-natured Hoke accepts her bossiness—up to a point. Daisy tells him what to do and he does. When Daisy tells him how to do his job, that’s a different story. Boolie (Kraig Swartz) is the designated middleman, doing his best to keep his mom happy and her chauffeur from quitting at her latest put-down. All of the characters grow—and grow beyond the South’s racist mindset.

Aside from a few weepy scenes, “Driving Miss Daisy” goes for laughs. Howard Millman (Carolyn Michel’s husband) directs with a sharp sense of comic timing. Though he’s not afraid to make the audience weep.

Laughter mixes with tears, and the personal is a microcosm of the political. Uhry’s well-drawn characters experience their intermittent odyssey at the height of the civil rights movement. The nation’s changes are off-stage; the character’s transformations bring it all home.

And true characters they are—three-dimensional people, not allegorical paper dolls. Daisy and Hoke aren’t the tolerant white

lady and the noble black man—or the exploitive white lady and suffering black man, either. They’re simply people, a mix of good and bad, but mostly good—and living in a time and culture that had plenty of bad going on. They end their long, strange road trip more deeply human than when then they started.

It’s a journey you’ll want to share.