Driving Miss Daisy Blossoms

I have never seen the movie version of Driving Miss Daisy, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Screenplay in 1987, and I think it is just as well not to clutter my mind with distractions of comparisons, but to take the play as it was originally produced 20 years ago when it first ran on Off-Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Even still I had some preconceived notions that the play would be a sweet but rather sentimental play about a crotchety old widow with a patient but kindly chauffeur.

And, in some ways it was that - but what I didn't anticipate that in it's own quiet way, it would have such depth, humor, as well as political implications.

The plot is simple enough. Daisy Werthan, played by Rosemary Prinz, is a wealth Jewish widow in her early 70's who crashes her car and, although uninjured, she can no longer drive, primarily because, as her son repeated states, no one will insure her.

Her sometimes understandably exasperated but genuinely loving son, Boolie Wertham, played by John Leonard Thompson, buys her a new car, but insists he get her a driver, which she steadfastly refuses, preferring instead to take the bus to the Piggly-Wiggly market. (I love that name - Piggly-Wiggly)

The chauffeur, Hoke Coleburn, played by Mel Johnson, Jr., waits her out, and finally after a week she allows him, begrudgingly to drive her where she needs to go. And drive her he does, over the next 25 years.

The play which is set mostly in Atlanta, Georgia, begins in 1948 and takes us through to 1973 and runs 90 minutes, without an intermission.

The play is broken up into numerous vignettes and scene changes which are creatively implied with a table here and a desk there, and a background of changing symbols in shadow - a chandelier for Miss Daisy's house, a tree limb for the outdoors, venetian blinds for Boolie's office. Very effective.

One Vignette has Miss Daisy and Hoke in the car, driving her to the synagogue, when they learn it has just been bombed. As horrid as this is, Miss Daisy insists to Hoke that the bombers made a terrible mistake, because theirs is a "reformed" synagogue, not one of those unenlightened orthodox synagogues.

Later when she wishes to go to a diner for Martin Luther King, Jr., her son Boolie, a prominent businessman in town, tells her he and his wife will not be attending because it might negatively effect his business. Thompson somehow manages to make Boolie's decision sound understandable and reasonable from his perspective, which is a real accomplishment.

Between each of the vignettes during the blackout and change of scene a musical interlude of pre-recorded violins and banjos played. The original music, composed by Robert Waldham, almost imperceptively links together the entire production.

The lighting was unnoticeable, which in the end is all I ask of lighting. The only time I notice the lighting is when a cue is missed.

The beginning, I felt was a bit over-directed. I rarely notice the direction, which I honestly think is a good sign. If the direction starts to become noticeable, the magic is broken. There was too much pacing back and forth. After that, there was no problem.

The sound otherwise was fine, except for one vignette set in the evening when some of the dialog was overpowered by excessively loud chirping crickets.

All three characters slowly, convincingly and almost inperceptively age over the 25 years of the play, their bodies changing slowly as particularly Miss Daisy and Hoke who are contemporaries, enter their 90's, with the associated aches and pains that come with old age.

But Prinz's Miss Daisy, determinedly insisting on life over everything, is a thing of wonder and beauty which brings tears to my eyes just remembering her popping open her beak-like mouth like a baby bird to receive a bite of pumpkin pie from Hoke, It is stunning. And to watch her insistently - almost fiercely, edge her walker forward, with the determination of a mountain climber scaling Mt. Everest is a monumental tribute to the human will.

Mel Johnson's chauffeur, Hoke Coleburn, is everything the part demands. He is totally believable as a black man living in a time and a place where his options are limited. But, even within the confines of a stifling social paradigm, he consistently brings a quiet joy and personal dignity and self-respect to his character.