Driving Miss Daisy
Agitating and preaching are effective means of persuasion, but few devices invite receptiveness to the message like a simple feel-good story. With its blameless yet pointed look at racism and intolerance in the mid-twentieth-century American South, playwright Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is engineered to have few detractors. In the current production at the Box Theater, resident company What’s That Smell? and director John Forlini use the odd-couple pairing of a white woman and a black man to deliver themes of big importance on a small scale.
As in the Academy Award–winning film it inspired, the play justly traces the begrudging professional (and creeping personal) relationship of elderly Daisy (Connie Cowper), an insistently self-sufficient Atlanta widow, and obsequious Hoke (Orson Wingo), the patient and eminently diplomatic black man hired to be her chauffer. Through a series of targeted vignettes stretching from shortly after World War II through the civil rights era, each inadvertently challenges and changes the other, but with gentle comedy and tender regard that keeps the show’s ninety minutes agreeable instead of severe. As Daisy’s enterprising and upwardly mobile son (and Hoke’s employer), Mark Konwinski serves as a necessary dramatic and comic foil, a representative of the younger generation against which his mother’s changing views are measured.
In the oblong Box playing space, the set appears designed by process of elimination: the largest layouts demand the largest (and most prominent) areas. Thus, the premise-critical car scenes come to be wedged between Daisy’s gently chintzy living room and Boolie’s obligatory office, and a nonspecific telephone is relegated to a corner nearly impossible to light. Set dressing and properties by Diane Kubik adorn the players and their surroundings with thoughtful vintage touches, although once again, no such details were possible in the case of the automobile, a blank makeshift affair lent annoying impermanence by afterthought pantomime. Even so, however non-intrinsic, the close house keeps the audience near enough to the action to draw them in, and the characters and scenarios do the rest. Forlini’s lighting design proficiently divides the many pat scenes; his sound design flows music under and through, chiming in with an unmistakably cinematic voice.
Although Daisy is subject to unfortunate prejudices and gaffes endemic of the time, this is far from a mere white-woman-learns-a-lesson morality play. Issues of religious discrimination are addressed as well as the galling racism, and halting steps both forward and backward are made on both sides of the relationship. A late reversal in which the increasingly progressive Daisy shames her son for his small-mindedness, then explains away her own unintentional cruelty, is particularly wrenching. Not even a quarter century can promise true parity between Daisy and Hoke, but the actors playing them prove a strong pair; clear attention to the context that drives their actions is a vital ingredient in a story that could not exist in a vacuum. Wingo’s exquisite tact serves the character throughout, demonstrating the extreme social vigilance required of an oppressed minority as well as the equivocal deference he uses to his clever advantage. As a counterpoint, Cowper improves with age, doing without in order to protect her identity as a plucky woman born of poverty, evolving her own moral compass in bold and flawed ways, and finally succumbing to a heartbreaking frailty that has a beauty all its own.
If this Driving Miss Daisy feels archetypal, the reason may not be evangelizing on the part of the script or players, so much as the years of racial tensions and codified injustice that made this world a reality. Forlini and company are careful to keep the central relationship a product of its time, rather than an object lesson. As a result, the flaws and realities of this sweet story are the primary point of connection with the viewer, which makes its hopeful outlook all the more rewarding.
March 31, 2012