Actors deliver Driving Miss Daisy
Civil rights-era drama light, sentimental and compelling
Driving Miss Daisy isn’t exactly a sports car of a play; it certainly isn’t built for speed or corners. It’s more of a sturdy little star vehicle, a bicycle built for two, as a song about another Daisy goes.
Substantial it may not be, but as you’ll see from the revival currently gracing — and that’s exactly the word — the stage at the Mayfield, Alfred Uhry’s episodic 1987 play can be sweet and affecting if it has some acting heft and authenticity. And that’s what happens in Ron Ulrich’s production, starring Michael Learned (a stage actor best known for her iconic role in TV’s The Waltons) and Walter Borden, with excellent contributions from Doug Mertz.
In its series of little vignettes, which hint lightly at the larger road trip for America in the momentous civil rights period 1948 to 1973, Driving Miss Daisy traces a friendship that ever-so-gradually develops between an aging and cranky Jewish widow in postwar Atlanta and her black chauffeur.
Daisy, who’s never lost the peremptory and reproving tones of her previous life as a school marm, is deeply resentful when her son saddles her with a coloured driver after she crashes her new Packard (she blames the car). Hoke is a provocation, a challenge both to her independence — “we were brought up to do for ourselves” — and her claim to be prejudice-free.
Learned has real presence. Her big, multi-angled voice, with its querulous edges, conveys a habit of authority that Daisy senses is under threat. And so does her body language, which gives social decorum a combative edge, too. And Learned, 74, charts the one-way journey into old age with convincing gradations of both. Gradually, as the years pass, the sturdy walk becomes more careful, a stomp that’s tempered with the knowledge of gravity. And the voice gets thinner, the neck more fixed.
Her Daisy is a compelling portrait of testiness and increasing vulnerability. And it’s matched in Borden’s sly performance as Hoke. The much-awarded Canadian actor gives us a man whose habitually conciliatory tones and bemused air are part of his chosen persona, his deliberate armour against the humiliations of the world. And it’s layered over an unswervable dignity, and reservoirs of anger. We understand that Hoke has deliberately chosen to be amused by absurdity. And only occasionally, as when his employer invites him at the very last moment to the Martin Luther King dinner, does he rise to overt resentment.
Meanwhile, as a counterpoint to the civil rights movement in the larger world, to which we get passing allusions from time to time — the 1958 bombing of the largest reform synagogue in Atlanta, for example — a prickly employer-employee relationship is deepening into friendship. It’s a friendship that in other times and other places might have turned to love; that’s another wisp of poignance here. The scene in which Daisy accuses Hoke of pinching a tin of salmon, and has to retreat from her triumph, embarrassingly, when his innocence is proven, is a turning point. And the infirmities of old age, documented so skilfully by both actors, are a bond.
The third character is Daisy’s son Boolie, a genial businessman whose Jewishness enters the foreground only when he balks at attending the Martin Luther King dinner because his business contacts would use it as an excuse to elbow him out. Mertz gives us a likable man, who combines knowingness and exasperation in a nuanced way; his encounters with Hoke are consistently amusing.
At heart, Uhry’s Pulitzer winner isn’t a fiery political play; its touch is light and sentimental. And Ulrich’s production wisely doesn’t try to weight the political background with news projections, or clutter the stage. Carmon Arlett’s design, lighted by Gail Ksionzyk, has chairs for the car, and pieces of elegant vintage furniture for Daisy’s leafy place. The focus is on the actors. And that’s as it should be.