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Colonial's roadworthy Driving Miss Daisy

by Bill Rodriguez

DRIVING MISS DAISY. By Alfred Uhry. Directed by Harland Meltzer. With Nikki Bruno, Adam Wade, and Steve Brady. At Colonial Theatre through July 5.

Driving Miss Daisy is a deceptive play. Hear it described and it sounds like a treacly little confection, bad for your theater standards, if not for your teeth. An elderly Southern lady grows fond of her black chauffeur as he learns to put up with her cranky personality over the 25 years that we follow them. How sweet. But the play does have a harder edge than that indicates. And the staging now at Colonial Theatre is a masterful accomplishment.

Of course, playwright Alfred Uhry gave them a little help. His first play in decades garnered him a Pulitzer in 1988, and his screen adaptation the following year grabbed a Best Picture Oscar. Although it sprawls in time over several decades, Uhry crafted a tightly structured portrait play out of growing up Jewish in Atlanta amidst relatives like Miss Daisy. Artful understatement and honesty make the predictable conflicts (over imperious bossiness, over racial insensitivity) come across as inevitable and understandable rather than as storytelling devices. Stirring together issues of prejudice and physical decline, Uhry set a volatile kettle on the burner. And he wisely knew that keeping it at slow simmer would create more tension than turning up the heat.

Daisy Werthan (Nikki Bruno) is 72 when we meet her in 1948. The widow's two dominant traits -- bullheaded unreason and temper -- are on full display in scene one. Right in her garage, she has just demolished her new Packard by accelerating in the wrong gear. She insists that "it was the car's fault!" and her son Boolie (Steve Brady) is just as firm about getting her a chauffeur. He chooses Hoke Coleburn (Adam Wade), who not only had experience driving for a local judge Boolie knew, but also asserted that he liked Jews, even though "most people think they're stingy." Miss Daisy would be in honest hands.

Colonial's trio of Equity actors really click, as directed by Harland Meltzer. While Brady's Boolie has the requisite forbearance to handle such a cranky mother, and the good humor to survive her, he also has backbone. Wade plays Hoke as a man who can get along with anyone, as Uhry has written him, but also adds an alert presence that's interests us before he speaks a word. We come to respect him as a man who defers to Miss Daisy not out of intimidation but out of simple politeness, which requires a sure sense of self. As for Miss Daisy herself, Bruno fumes and fusses -- and shines. But more of that below.

As you would expect from this period and setting, an undercurrent of racial turmoil rises to the surface to be glimpsed now and then. But it does so without having to actually raise a slavering head. Uhry has created a basically benign world, a microcosm of comity; one so calm that the slightest ripple reveals what we know lurks below. Such subtlety in the stage version is why the mere appearance of menacing state police in one of the film adaptation's scenes seems heavy-handed. Uhry is concerned here with denial, one of the sources of racism, rather than with pointy heads in bed sheets. At one point, Boolie explains to his mother why he wont go to an awards dinner for Martin Luther King: his business friends wouldn't like it, would josh him on the golf course, would be less inclined to patronize his company. Since we have gotten to know him, we cant help but be sympathetic, even as we tsk-tsk.

Miss Daisy's denial complements the most overtly powerful scene in the play, when Hoke learns that the reason traffic is tied up on the way to the synagogue is that the place has been bombed. Miss Daisy insists that he must be wrong, and failing in that, that the bombers must have confused her reformed synagogue with an orthodox or conservative one. Against this eye-clenching blindness tumbles a horrible memory of Hoke's, casually related, that she all but presses her hands against her ears to shut out.

This is the performance of a career for Colonial veteran Bruno. I've seen Jessica Tandy create her captivatingly imperious Daisy in the original production Off-Broadway, and believe me -- Bruno's merging of fear and ferocity is so on-target and energized that it should be the definitive Miss Daisy.