Driving Miss Daisy
Walnut Street Theatre
825 Walnut St.
Philadelphia
Showing Jan. 15 — Feb. 2
Seen Jan. 15
“Talk about things changing. They ain't changed all that much,” a Black chauffeur named Hoke mutters to himself while dropping his white Jewish passenger off at a dinner for civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s the most resonant line in Walnut Street Theatre’s downsized adaptation of the 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy. The line is spoken not by the story’s protagonist but by her less-fleshed out “best friend” and absurdly amiable servant.
It’s the most realistic moment in an overly optimistic production whose opening night took place days before a mixed-message Monday: On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term while the nation simultaneously celebrates MLK's birthday.
That timing shifts the gears on Driving Miss Daisy: When it debuted, the nation was just beginning to celebrate King's birthday as a federal holiday, signed into law by Ronald Reagan. How does the story land now that the nation prepares to take a turn backward from King's promised moral-universe "arc toward justice"?
Driving Miss Daisy, penned by Jewish playwright Alfred Uhry, is an implicitly whitewashed look at the relationship between two people from different backgrounds similarly bound by cultures of domestic service: An aging Jewish mother, Daisy, and her African American driver, Hoke, who is hired by her son in order to skirt high car insurance costs. The pair become unlikely witnesses to one another’s slow moving lives between the fast-paced political years between 1948 and 1973 in Atlanta, Georgia.
The story’s perspective, like the pair’s relationship, is inherently imbalanced. We get far more insight into the circumstances of Daisy’s reality as an elderly woman resigned to watching the world through the confines of her suburban home life than we ever get to learn about Hoke’s reality. His hardships are primarily articulated through selective anecdotes shared with Daisy as a means of emotionally swaying white viewers.
It was the ideal story to adapt to the big screen in 1989. The film version starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman took home a bundle of Oscars, including Best Picture. The movie, with its sentimental score of upbeat, synthetic orchestral music and splashy color scheme, is a perfected, PG product of the times. It embodies the return to marketable studio-driven cinema that followed the experimental filmmaking of the 1970s, a change that symbolized artistic selling-out accompanied by the cultural shift out of a protest-driven populace into the Ronald Reagan-era of political conformity and free market spirit.
The movie is watchable because its medium showcases talented actors who infuse humanity into a couple of uncreative characters. Morgan Freeman, in particular, lets his face do a lot of the talking. Hoke’s dialogue is inevitably stunted given the ramifications of his role in this story, but Freeman conveys pride, shame and internal conflict otherwise unrepresented through the writing.
This quality is lost in Walnut Street Theatre’s one-hour, feel-good speed-run of what was never meant to be a saccharine story. The production – stripped to three characters – amounts to a manicured SparkNotes translation of the widely watched Warner Bros. blockbuster.
We don’t get the texture of deep South landscape as described by the film’s shots of the cotton company owned by Daisy’s family or the long roads and wrong turns taken by Hoke and Daisy from behind the wheel of the wealthy woman’s Hudson Commodore automobile. The dialogue is sensationalized in order to clarify the tensions between Daisy and Hoke; the night I attended, the audience cheered and applauded when Hoke lashes out for the first time at his foul-mouthed boss after she bars him from taking a bathroom break on a long drive. “How do you think I feel asking you if I can make water like a damn dog?” he rhetorically inquires. “I ain’t just a back for you to look at.” In the movie, he calmly compares himself to a child before getting out of the car — he knows better than to throw a full-blown fit in front of his prejudiced employer. He needs the job.
Meanwhile, the audience was in an uproar over Daisy’s unchecked remarks – for example, when the former grade-school teacher gives Hoke a rudimentary lesson on how to read. (“I’ve taught some of the stupidest children…”) The belly laughs suggested a nostalgic recall of the movie’s script rather than an organic reaction to what was happening on stage.
We’ve aged out of kumbaya lenses on the promises of desegregation. It’s not the ‘80s anymore.
Or is it?
Have we returned once more to an era of false optimism of American grandeur – minus the finesse of the original film and the illusions of the post-civil rights period?
Sitting in the backseat of the theater that hosted the famed first presidential debate of 1976 between Carter and Ford to watch Driving Miss Daisy didn’t make me feel good about how times have changed. It made me reflect on how long we’ve been lounging on the remote control's “rewind” button.
Tickets to Driving Miss Daisy are available here.
