Theater Review—

With ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ It’s All In The (Great) Acting

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is a modern American classic. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the 1987 stage play, and the Academy Award for the subsequent film, it explores the thorny relationship between an elderly Jewish Atlanta widow and the African-American whom her son hires to be her driver after she has one too many automobile accidents.

Spanning a 25 year period, from 1948 to 1973, the play deals with racial issues, the position of Jews in the South, the tribulations of growing old, and the nature of friendship. It is by turns funny, schmaltzy, and at times, a real tear jerker. Above all, it is a huge opportunity for actors to show what they can do.

Under Rob Ruggiero’s direction, Hartford TheaterWorks is celebrating the play’s twentieth anniversary. The performers make the most of that chance, with acting that is about as good as you will ever see, anywhere.

Rosemary Prinz is 72-year old Daisy Werthan, the feisty old lady. She claims she doesn’t want hired help intruding in her kitchen and her life, and she says it will make people think she is rich when they see her riding around with a chauffeur, but in fact it is the loss of independence that she dreads.

Mel Johnson Jr. is Hoke Coleburn, an easygoing, apparently obsequious 60-year-old who badly needs a job, and is willing to endure Miss Daisy’s scolding and complaints in order to keep it.

John Leonard Thompson is Daisy’s son, Boolie Werthan, an anxiously affable mill owner with a social-climbing wife who decorates her house with Christmas lights and longs to mingle with Episcopalians. Boolie struggles dutifully to manage his mother’s affairs, but it is Hoke, with his patient good humor and his willingness to listen, who coaxes her into civility.

Without ever shedding the mantle of humble deference which black servants were conditioned to show to their white employers, Hoke gradually raises the level of their discourse, forcing her to see him as an individual human being. When he has to, he tells her firmly that “I am not a dog. I am not a child. I am not just a neck that you look at from the back seat as you ride in the car. I am a man.”

The play is only 90 minutes long, with no intermission, but you watch both Daisy and Hoke age 25 years in that time, and as Daisy’s defenses gradually wear down, you see her realize that this kind and honorable man is truly her best friend.

The play ends with Boolie and Hoke paying a Thanksgiving visit to the nursing home where 97-year old Daisy, stooped and palsied, navigates her walker across the room to meet them, and in a final gesture of intimacy, opens her mouth like a bird to allow Hoke to feed her pieces of holiday pie with a fork she can no longer manage by herself.

It’s all in the acting, and this TheaterWorks production is as good as it gets.

(Performances continue through October 14. Check the Enjoy calendar for curtain and ticket details, call 860-527-7838 or visit TheaterWorksHartford.org.)