No subject gets discussed more often
and more vehemently around the world than the sharp decline of the
American economy and the upcoming election between a Democratic
African-American presidential candidate and his white Republican
opponent. I do not know many plays that made me think of these hard
and challenging times as much as Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred
Uhry—a writer who intimately knows not only the Jewish world, but the
tension and underlying racial currents in the United States—the only
American playwright who won three of the most prestigious American
awards for dramatic writing: the Academy Award, the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama, and the Tony Award.
The Hedgerow Theatre in Media—the first resident repertory theatre in the country—could
not have chosen a better play to bring together Jewish people,
African-Americans, and whites to laugh, to cry, and to talk about
perceptions we may have of each other.
Temple University’s Peter Reynolds directed Driving Miss Daisy at
the beautiful Hedgerow Theatre with great sensitivity, so much so that
the audience at the opening night gave a standing ovation to the superb
cast of the amazing Nancy Boykin as Miss Daisy Werthan, the nuanced and
powerful Harum Ulmer, Jr., who played her black driver Hoke Coleburn,
and the strong and handsome Andy Joos, who played Daisy’s son Boolie
Werthan, a businessman in the South, and Cathie Miglionico’s, who
designed the costumes, Zoran Kovcic, who created a beautiful and very
functional stage setting, illuminated by the perfect lighting design of
Maria Shaplin, all of which enhanced this very intimate play.
Uhry’s drama shows an African-American
chauffeur who gets belittled left, right, and center by Miss Daisy, an
elderly Jewish lady in Atlanta, GA, who has trouble letting go of the
memories of her poor background during her youth. Initially, she
carries a great deal of prejudice against people of color, unlike her
son who, from the very beginning, presents himself as an open-minded
businessman. While Boolie tries to help his mother move forward, she
resists it every step of the way, first making fun of Boolie’s wife
Florine for enjoying the company of non-Jews, and later teasing her
son’s wife for finding “heaven on earth” by “socializing with
Episcopalians.”
Miss Daisy mocks “that silly Santa
Claus winking on the front door!” of a Jewish house and belittles the
looks of her daughter-in-law by saying, “If I had a nose like Florine,
I wouldn’t go around saying Merry Christmas to anybody.” When Hoke
objects and tells her that he enjoys Christmas at her son’s house, Miss
Daisy shoots back, “I don’t wonder. You’re the only Christian in the
place.” The audience at the Hedgerow laughed almost non-stop during a
play that shows human foibles but also the fear that sits below the
humor, a kind of trembling humanity that one doesn’t see too often.
Several times, Miss Daisy refers to
her poor economic background, where the family could not even afford to
feed a stray cat. Her driver then reminds her, “You is rich, Miz
Daisy!”—a notion that she resists as her mindset is still anchored in
the past, not in the present. “Yassum,” Hoke replies, but it “look
like you doin’ alright now.” In fact, the working class chauffeur
becomes a kind of reality check for her, even though she did not
acknowledge it until the surprise ending of the play.
Uhry shows the most subtle
psychological shades of people from different social classes and ethnic
groups who realize that deep down, they all have been discriminated
against. The chauffeur, a streetwise man in spite of his attempt to be
polite, has the courage to say things that one would not ask in polite
society: “Mist’ Werthan? Y’all people Jewish, ain’ you...I’d druther
drive for Jews. People always talkin’ bout they stingy and they cheap,
but don’t say none of that ‘roun me.” In fact, Mr. Werthan is very
generous from the very beginning, and tries to help his mother by
paying for the chauffeur, who becomes her companion, of sorts, and her
sounding board.
Given the subtle racial tensions in
this society as they are being played out every day in election
commercials, articles, and conversations by the water coolers up and
down the US, Miss Daisy, with her Southern Jewish values, slowly
undergoes a change because she experiences some of her driver’s
realities. For example, according to the laws in those days, people of
color were not allowed to use a restroom at gas stations in the South.
Once Miss Daisy experiences her own
synagogue being bombed, a real paradigm shift takes place in her head.
When Hoke informs her that she can’t go to the Temple, she responds in
her usual Pavlovian manner: “Well, it’s a mistake. I’m sure they meant
to bomb one of the conservative synagogues or the orthodox one. The
Temple is reform. Everybody knows that.”
When her driver responds, “It doan’
matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes like light
or dark we all the same nigger,” Miss Daisy still refuses to believe
it, but she eventually finds her way to attend a dinner in honor of
Martin Luther King. While the old lady is beginning to change, her
open-minded and generous son has second thoughts about any public
support for a person of color.
She teases her son: “The Werthan
Company will go out of business if you attend the King dinner?”
Challenged, the successful businessman then shares with her how
vulnerable he feels: “A lot of the men I do business with wouldn’t like
it. They wouldn’t come right out and say so. They’d just snicker and
call me Martin Luther Werthan behind my back—something like that. And
I’d begin to notice that my banking business wasn’t being handled by
the top dogs. Maybe I’d start to miss out on a few special favors, a
few tips. I wouldn’t hear about certain lunch meetings at the Commerce
Club. Little things you can’t quite put your finger on…I still have to
conduct business in this town.”
He then asks his mother, “When did you
get so fired up about Martin Luther King? Time was, I’d have heard a
different story,” to which she replies in her contrarian manner, “Why,
Boolie! I’ve never been prejudiced and you know it!” It’s at that
moment that the driver says what might characterize both the situation
in the past and in our own time: “Things changin’, but they ain’t
change all dat much.”
The old driver in some ways represents
Everyman, who endures in spite of the forces that work against him.
When his boss, Mr. Werthan, wishes Miss Daisy “Happy Thanksgiving,” he
tells her, “Remember, Mama. [Florine’s] a Republican National
Committee-woman now,” to which the now liberated Miss Daisy replies,
full of contempt, “Good God!”
The tough old lady also shows a caring
side. For example, while planting flowers on her husband’s grave, Miss
Daisy realizes that her chauffeur cannot read the gravestones. She
immediately swings into action and teaches him to put individual
letters together to spell. Later, at Christmas, one of the most moving
scenes of the play takes place when she takes a small package wrapped
in brown paper from her purse, assuring her driver that “This isn’t a
Christmas present…You know I don’t give Christmas presents … I just
happened to run across it this morning.” When the illiterate Hoke
unwraps the package, he fights tears, looking at her gift for him,
“Ain’ nobody ever give me a book,” and laboriously reading the cover,
“Hand Writing Copy Book—Grade Five.”
But just before he may become too
sentimental, Miss Daisy reverts to her regular pattern of
communication: “Jews don’t have any business giving Christmas
presents. And you don’t need to go yapping about this to Boolie and
Florine.”
I was reminded of Mother Courage, who,
like Miss Daisy, was not exactly a paradigm of virtue and gentleness;
yet, audiences around the globe always admired her toughness and her
feisty way of defying the world. Bertolt Brecht, who wanted his Mother
Courage and Her Children to be a didactic play that teaches about the
forces of evil, rewrote her role numerous times to roughen up her
character, and still the audiences loved her.
The same is true for Uhry’s Miss
Daisy: no matter how prickly and narrow-minded and suspicious she
appears at times, her innermost goodness comes through powerfully. For
example, when in her nineties, frail and helpless, and living in a
retirement home, she takes Hoke’s hand and tells her former driver—now
an old man who can’t drive any more but who still visits her as often
as he can—that he is her “best friend.” He then cuts a small piece of
the Thanksgiving pie and gently feeds her like his own child.
Quite a few members of the audience
laughed and cried many times during a performance that, as the
discussions afterwards showed, reminded many theatre goers of our own
times and those hidden forces that make people vote their fears and not
their strengths, punch the screens of voting machines with old
prejudices and not new visions. Miss Daisy, the former schoolteacher
and her black chauffeur are still driving, not only on the stage of the
Hedgerow, the oldest theatre in the Philadelphia area, but also in the
minds of all those who opened up to one of the most moving plays in
modern American drama.
As a college professor who conducts a
weekly workshop on “News Around the World” at Martins Run, America’s
oldest Jewish retirement home, I asked myself, “and who is going to
drive the many Miss Daisies and the many Hoke Coleburns of our own time
to the election booth on November 4th?”
Henrik Eger
Henrik Eger, Ph.D., author of the
docudrama Metronome Ticking; the play Mendelssohn Does Not Live Here
Anymore; Board member of Theatre Ariel, the Jewish Theatre of
Philadelphia; and writer-director of the YouTube video All About Jewish
Theatre: The World’s Largest Secular Synagogue and Open University.
www.henrikeger.com
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Driving Miss Daisy, Hedgerow Theatre (610) 565-4211
