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LIGHTNING REVIEW: Fine performances drive suddenly topical 'Miss Daisy'

Janie Bushway stars in the title role and Playhouse newcomer Marvin Bell plays Hoke in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ playing through July 26 at the Playhouse Downtown. [Photo by SCOTT TREADWAY/Treadshots]

A year ago, when it selected “Driving Miss Daisy” for this season’s lineup, the creative team at the Flat Rock Playhouse could not have known that Ferguson and Baltimore and Charleston would propel race relations back into the news and reopen old wounds.

But here we were, on Thursday night at the Playhouse Downtown, watching a college aged girl, backpack slung over her shoulder, picking up a newspaper with a fresh account of the Charleston carnage while a radio announcer read headlines from race-torn American cities.
Talk about topical.
Spanning 25 years from the end of World War II to 1973, the play opens with Miss Daisy leaving the house to drive to the Piggly Wiggly. Blackout. Crash. Another new car headed to the junkyard.
Miss Daisy, played by Janie Bushway, demolishes the three-week-old Packard and wrecks a neighbor’s garage and somehow emerges unscathed and unmoved. “It was the car’s fault,” she tells her son, Boolie.
“Cars don’t behave,” Boolie responds. “They’re behaved upon.”
Depicting a son’s love with patience and humor, the always likable Michael MacCauley provides the important bridge between his mother and her driver.
The latest crash convinces the son, a successful print shop owner, that his mother’s driving days are over. He goes behind her back to hire a chauffer, an out-of-work driver who is at once deferential and voluble. For a while, Hoke’s new $20-a-week job requires him only to sit in the kitchen all day. Miss Daisy is too stubborn to let him drive her anywhere. When she finally relents, he takes the most direct route to the Piggly Wiggly, despite Miss Daisy’s protests that he must turn on Highland. She implores him to slow down.
“We ain’t going but 19 miles and hour,” he tells her. "We're barely moving."
“I like to go under the speed limit,” she responds.
“The speed limit is 35,” he says.
On like that the two go.
Like Boolie, Hoke forces forbearance to overcome exasperation.
Marvin Bell, in his Flat Rock Playhouse debut, has played the role of Hoke to strong reviews before, winning a Broadway World best actor nomination two years ago. One of the best parts of Thursday night's show was watching Bell's emotional appreciation of the standing ovation from the nearly full theater.
“You needs a chauffer and Lord knows I needs a job,” he tells Miss Daisy after she delivers another scolding over an imagined transgression.
The low point — and Daisy’s comeuppance — comes when she tells Boolie that Hoke has stolen a 33-cent can of salmon from the cupboard. Before they can confront the chauffer, he arrives for the workday with a replacement can of salmon, confessing that he had eaten one the day before.
Chastened for once, Daisy becomes a little gentler. In the most moving scene of the first act, the retired fifth-grade schoolteacher asks Hoke to place a vase of flowers on a Mr. Bower’s grave at the cemetery. When Hoke confesses that he can’t read, Daisy is both appalled and sympathetic. “If you know your letters, you can read,” she tells him. “You just don’t know you can.”

* * * *

The story powerfully portrays the gradual ravage of age — on Daisy’s mind and Hoke’s eyesight — and here is where Bushway and Bell shine. As they age, they grow mutually dependent. Cast together out of necessity, the white Jewish Southern woman and the black driver raised on a rural farm become closer out of true compassion and friendship. But not so close, in the mid-Sixties, that Daisy is comfortable enough to invite Hoke to a fundraiser featuring Martin Luther King Jr. She doesn’t mention the possibility of his going as her guest until they’re driving to the event.
“Isn’t it wonderful the way things are changing” between the races, she says.
Hoke is hurt that she had never brought it up till that moment.
“Things ain’t changed that much,” he says.
It’s a pivotal moment, one that seems as current and relative as the Confederate flag on the Statehouse grounds in Columbia. Change is glacially slow, and just when we think we’ve changed socially and culturally, we’re reminded that our national imagination runs ahead of our hearts. Director Dave Hart has subtly and creatively updated the show with two young people (Lainie Robertson and Dakota McMinn) — one white, one black — as silent observers on the periphery. It’s a powerful drama through and through, serendipitously staged during a time when we could well use a look in the mirror.

* * * *

In the final moving scene, we see their shared history weld Daisy and Hoke together at last as two human beings of no color. Stooped, shrunken and shuffling slowly behind her walker, Bushway, a veteran Vagabond, has never been better. Nearly blind, his sense of humor intact, Hoke helps his old friend with one last act of kindness. Breaking out for a moment from the prison of dementia, Miss Daisy manages an appreciative smile at the man who has become her best friend.
“Things ain’t changed that much,” Hoke had said.

But as “Driving Miss Daisy” shows us, things can change. Amen.

* * * *

Performances of Driving Miss Daisy are 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $15-40 and can be purchased by calling the Playhouse box office at 828-693-0731, toll-free at 866-732-8008 or visiting www.flatrockplayhouse.org.