Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry

First published: 1988

First produced: 1987, at Playwrights Horizons, New York City

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1948-1973

Locale: In and around Atlanta, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Daisy Werthan, an elderly Jewish widow
• Hoke Coleburn, her somewhat younger chauffeur
• Boolie Werthan, her son

The Play

Set in Atlanta during the 1940’s through the 1970’s, Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy, is an engaging drama that captures effectively the blossoming friendship between two unlikely characters—Miss Daisy, a wealthy, elderly Jewish widow, and Hoke, her African American chauffeur. Uhry explores the nuances of their growing personal affinity within the context of Atlanta, historically the locale of economic instability and significant civil rights activity. Proudly self-reliant, independent and sprightly, Miss Daisy is forced by her son, Boolie, to accept Hoke as her chauffeur. Boolie determines that she is incapable of driving herself after she backs her car into the garage of her neighbors, the Pollards. Although initially she is reluctant to accept Hoke’s services, Miss Daisy soon perceives that she has more in common with Hoke than she ever imagined. Within the first few days of their encounter, Hoke defines the parameters of their relationship when he says, “Miz Daisy, you needs a chauffeur and Lawd know, I needs a job. Let’s jes’ leave it at dat.” Hoke’s observation of their situation echoes Miss Daisy’s statement about Idella, her housekeeper: “She’s been coming to me three times a week since you [Boolie] were in the eighth grade and we know how to stay out of each other’s way.”

Uhry weaves the tapestry of their relationship deftly with incidents like one in which Miss Daisy accuses Hoke of eating her can of salmon without her permission and demands that Boolie have a talk with him but is deeply embarrassed when Hoke returns the next morning with a new can of salmon as replacement. This incident is similar to the morning of the ice storm, years later, when Hoke braves the storm to bring Miss Daisy her morning coffee from Krispy Kreme as he knows that she does not have electricity in her house. Such scenes define the rich texture of their relationship. Another such incident occurs when Hoke and Miss Daisy go to Alabama for her brother Walter’s ninetieth birthday. They get delayed after losing their way once, in spite of her meticulous planning, and Hoke has an urgent need to relieve himself. They have just passed a service station, but it is the age of Jim Crow, and “colored” people are not allowed to use this facility, so Hoke stops the car just a few miles short of Mobile, much to the chagrin of Miss Daisy. He leaves the car and takes the key with him. She realizes her dependence on him and he articulates his need for maintaining his dignity.

Along with these “nicks and dents” in the relationship, Uhry provides glimpses of rare intimacy emerging between the two characters. They share their deepest memories uninhibitedly. One such moment occurs when Miss Daisy shares with girlish timidity her first memory of her trip to Mobile, Alabama, and the memory of the salty taste of the ocean waters. When Hoke drives Miss Daisy to the synagogue and learns that the temple has been bombed, he recalls the lynching of his friend’s father and the effect it had on him as a young boy while gently reminding Miss Daisy that although she and the world may claim that things are changing, prejudice still lingers. Earlier, during a routine visit to the cemetery, Hoke also discloses to her, with great embarrassment, his inability to read. Miss Daisy teaches him to read and gives him a gift at Christmastime (all the while insisting that it is not a Christmas gift). It is a writing tablet that she used as a teacher. With characteristic sense and keen sensibility, Uhry charts the course of their friendship through everyday incidents.

There are two other characters in the play, Idella, the housekeeper, and her daughter-in-law, Florine, who are so often alluded to, and in such vivid manner, that the audience feels their presence. Uhry shows the bond strengthening between Hoke and Miss Daisy by showing how she gradually takes him into confidence and feels comfortable enough to make derogatory remarks about Florine. When Idella dies, Miss Daisy and Hoke feel her absence, and Miss Daisy remarks that Idella is lucky, thus revealing her innermost fears about her own future. Idella and Florine serve as catalysts in strengthening the bond between Hoke and Miss Daisy.

Near the end of the play, Miss Daisy is in her nineties, slow in her movements, but with her characteristic pride and independence intact. However, she suffers an attack of senile dementia one day, and Hoke encounters a distraught Miss Daisy desperately looking for her students’ papers, thinking that she is still a teacher. Hoke warns her assertively that if she does not collect herself together she may end up in an institution. Miss Daisy then admits to Hoke that he is her best friend. Boolie sells the house two years after Miss Daisy’s admittance to a nursing home, and the play ends on a very tender note: Affirming their long-lasting friendship, Hoke feeds Miss Daisy her Thanksgiving pie.

Dramatic Devices

Driving Miss Daisy is a one-act play with scene shifts occurring about twenty-four times throughout the play. The play spans two and one-half decades. The structure of the play is episodic and moves chronologically forward, providing insight into characters’ lives through simple events and incidents like a trip to the cemetery or to Alabama to attend a birthday celebration, a Christmas party at Boolie’s home, an ice storm, a celebration of Martin Luther King, and a visit to a nursing home. The plot and action are deceptively simple while the dialogue slowly unravels key information about the main characters. When Boolie appraises Hoke of his mother’s “high-strung” and independent nature and wonders if Hoke would be able to handle her, Hoke’s pithy response is “I use to wrastle hogs to the ground at killin’ time, and ain’ no hog get away from me yet.” Uhry creates a charming lyrical rhythm by using southern dialect punctuated with colloquial expressions. He is a master of understatement, and it is what the play does not say that actually enhances its appeal.

Issues concerning ethnicity and race, conflicts between the young and old, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile are all addressed with subtlety and economy. The exposition, besides introducing the conflict, also imparts necessary information pertaining to the geography, economy, and time through dialogue about cars, insurance, and the churches that people attend. The climax is very restrained and refined, with Miss Daisy simply saying to Hoke, “You’re my best friend.” At the heart of the play is the value of human dignity, integrity, and humans’ inherent dependence on one another, which becomes the pervasive motif throughout the play. The characters, their actions, and the dialogue highlight this theme. When Boolie insists on hiring Hoke to drive Miss Daisy around, she responds,

I am seventy-two years old as you so gallantly reminded me and I am a widow, but unless they rewrote the Constitution and didn’t tell me, I still have rights. And one of my rights is the right to invite who I want—not who you want—into my house. You do accept the fact that this is my house?

Humor is another significant device that Uhry uses to underscore the personalities of the characters and make them come alive without elaborate descriptions or scene settings. One example is Hoke’s summation of his achievement, at the beginning of his tenure as Miss Daisy’s chauffeur, driving his reluctant passenger to the local Piggly Wiggly: “Yassuh, only took six days. Same time it take the Lawd to make the worl’.”

Critical Context

Alfred Uhry’s body of work includes songs, adaptations, librettos, musical works, and film scripts. Driving Miss Daisy was originally written for his family members and first staged in a theater that would hold approximately seventy-five people. Uhry has noted that he was surprised at the play’s subsequent and overwhelmingly wide appeal. When the play was made into a film, he received an Academy Award for best screenplay adaptation. Composer Robert Waldman, his long-standing collaborator with whom he worked as lyricist and librettist for The Robber Bridegroom (pr. 1975, pb. 1978; based on the novella by Eudora Welty), also composed the music for the premiere of Driving Miss Daisy. The expertise Uhry gained in his musicals Here’s Where I Belong (pr. 1968; based on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, 1955) and America’s Sweetheart (pr. 1985), in addition to his career as a teacher of playwriting and lyric writing, provided the technical expertise for Driving Miss Daisy, although the characters were modeled after his own relatives and acquaintances. In his preface to the play, he attributes the play’s remarkable success to the fact that “I wrote what I knew to be the truth and people have recognized it as such.”

Sources for Further Study

Gussow, Mel. “Driving Miss Daisy.” New York Times, April 16, 1987, p. C22.

Kauffman, Stanley. “Cars and Other Vehicles.” The New Republic 202 (January 22, 1990): 26-28.

Kauffman, Stanley. “Southern Comforts.” The New Republic 208 (April 5, 1993): 30-31.