Driving Miss Daisy
By Alfred Uhry
Introduction
72 year old Daisy Werthan, a Jewish widow, can no longer operate a car safely. In her last driving outing, she demolished her new car, a garage, and a shed. Her son Boolie decides that Daisy needs a chauffeur to drive her around her hometown of Atlanta, GA. Daisy disagrees violently, saying that she is capable of driving herself. Ignoring his mother’s protests, Boolie hires a 60 year old African- American driver named Hoke Coleburn to be Daisy’s chauffeur.
About the Selection
Driving Miss Daisy is the story of how Daisy and Hoke learn to get along and value each other over a 25 year period. Their relationship grows to the point where, near the end of the play, Daisy can say to Hoke, “You’re my best friend.”
Playwright Alfred Uhry based the main characters, Daisy and Hoke, on his grandmother and her African-American chauffeur, Will Coleman. The play was originally performed in the spring of 1987 at a small New York theater that seated only 74 people. Uhry thought that was the right size for a little play that would appeal only to him, his family, and a few other Southerners.
He was amazed to find out that its appeal was much broader. In one of the glowing reviews of the play, critic Mel Gussow of the New York Times wrote, “The author and his actors repeatedly embellish the story with strokes of humanity and humor, as the two people come to realize they have far more in common than they ever publicly admit.”
Driving Miss Daisy won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and in 1989 Uhry wrote the screenplay for the movie version. The film, starring Morgan Freeman as Hoke, Jessica Tandy as Daisy, and Dan Ackroyd as Boolie, won four Academy Awards. The story takes place in the 1940s- 70s.
About the Author
Alfred Uhry, the son of a social worker and a furniture salesman, was born in Atlanta, GA, in 1936. Although he and his family were Jewish, he was not raised in a strict Jewish home and remembers celebrating Christmas and Easter along with his non-Jewish friends.
Mr. Uhry graduated from Brown University and then moved to New York City to write lyrics for musicals. For several years, he worked with composer Robert Waldman and taught playwriting part-time.
Frustrated with his limited success, Uhry had decided to return to teaching full-time when his interest in writing his own play was renewed, and he completed Driving Miss Daisy. The success of the play was probably responsible for his continued efforts at playwrighting.
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In 1996, Uhry’s play The Last Night of Ballyhoo premiered in Atlanta. That play, like Driving Miss Daisy, is set in Atlanta and features characters based on people Uhry knew as a child. The Last Night of Ballyhoo won the 1997 Tony Award for Best Play and was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
About the Lessons
The lessons we do during our unit on Driving Miss Daisy will focus on character. The characters in a story or play are the people or animals who perform the action. If a character in a play is truly effective and unique, you will remember him or her long after you leave the theater. The challenge for a playwright is to create characters who have as much genuine personality as the people you meet every day. When the playwright does his or her job well, you begin to feel as if you know the characters on stage as well as you know your own family and friends.
Characters
As stated previously, one of the biggest challenges for an author is creating believable characters. Some authors say that before they begin to write, they have a clear picture of each character in their mind. They know how each character looks, sounds, and acts before they write a single word. Writing about these characters, then, is simply a matter of revealing them to the audience or reader.
Other authors, however, do not have such a clear picture of their characters before they begin to write. These authors’ characters almost seem to create themselves as the story progresses.
No matter how an author goes about his or her job, the outcome should be the creation of characters who feel, speak, and act the way real, living human beings do. In order to make these characters “come to life,” authors use a process called characterization. In plays, most characterization is accomplished through dialogue and action. You learn about characters through what they say and do, since you can’t read about what they are thinking, as you can in a short story or novel.
Every word a character says and every move he or she makes work together to create a complete person. Slowly, as the play progresses, you begin to know each of the characters as well as the playwright knows them, and you see how they grow and change over time (dynamic characters).