Driving Miss Daisy

by:    Alfred Uhry

“Driving Miss Daisy” is a heartwarming drama about Daisy Werthan, a rich, sharp-tongued Jewish widow of seventy two. The setting is the deep South, in 1948, prior to the beginning of the civil rights movement. Having recently demolished another car, Daisy is informed by her son, Boolie, that henceforth she must rely on the services of a chauffeur. The person Boolie hires for the job is a thoughtful, unemployed black man, Hoke, whom Miss Daisy immediately regards with disdain and who, in turn, is not impressed with his employer’s patronizing tone and, he believes, her latent prejudice. But, in a series of absorbing scenes spanning twenty-five years, the two, despite their mutual differences, grow ever closer to, and more dependent upon, each other. Slowly and steadily the dignified, good-natured Hoke breaks down the stern defenses of the ornery old lady, as she teaches him to read and write. In a gesture of good will and shared concern, she invites him to join her at a banquet in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. As the play ends Hoke has a final visit with Miss Daisy, now ninety-seven and confined to a nursing home, and while it is evident that a vestige of her fierce independence and sense of position still remain, it is also movingly clear that they have both come to realize they have more in common than they ever believed possible—and that times and circumstances would ever allow them to publicly admit.