Walnut Street Theatre presents Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy

Better-known for its 1989 screen adaptation starring Morgan Freeman, Driving Miss Daisy tells the story of Daisy Werthan, a wealthy white Jewish woman living in Atlanta, and her chauffeur, Hoke, a Black man with a sharp sense of humor. After a car accident, Daisy is no longer able to drive herself, so her son hires Hoke, whom Daisy initially mistrusts due to unconscious biases she carries toward non-white people.

Fine performances, flat script

The three-person cast each delivers a fine individual performance. Johnnie Hobbs, Jr. fills Hoke’s shoes as a large, boisterous presence onstage, while earning the biggest laughs of the evening with well-timed, biting comments. Scott Greer does his best to breathe life into Boolie, Daisy’s son, a character who on the page lacks much of a discernible personality. Wendy Scharfman balances Daisy’s biases with her more sympathetic qualities, keeping the audience on her side throughout. But the play’s flat characterization hinders the efforts of the individual actors. Scenes are too short for any meaningful chemistry to develop, another failure of the script.

Director Bernard Havard often fails to employ basic theatrical vocabularies. As the story unfolds across many different locations, there are several moments when the production halts to change scenery in low lighting, despite the presence of interstitial scenes—one-sided phone calls, namely—that a more competent production could use to pull focus while the scenery moves. Meanwhile, during dialogue, actors usually sit or stand in one place, with little movement to add dimension to the action. Although some of this is due to the number of scenes that take place within Hoke’s car, there is still a lack of directorial curiosity on display. I wonder how the subtleties of body language or physical activity might have helped accentuate what little subtext exists in the script.

Over the course of decades, Hoke and Daisy’s relationship develops into a friendship, and the latter’s biases are stripped away. This is a familiar trope in white media: a white person learns to set aside their biases through a friendship with a person from a different background. The prevailing message is that the specters of racism and prejudice can be exorcised through the simple act of learning to get along with others.

Fraught context

While it may seem cynical to criticize a well-intentioned story like this, the context of this production is, at best, fraught.

In 2021, after the Walnut issued a cease and desist against an artist who questioned its diversity practices, a group of artists organized to demand accountability from the Walnut for institutional racism. The theater’s response, including a DEI seminar that catered toward whiteness (according to sources who were there), was met with criticism. It seemed that little, if any, change was occurring behind the scenes. Four years later, in 2025, we have Driving Miss Daisy, a play that demands nothing from institutions, and indeed reinforces a white status quo, where individual effort is presented as the only panacea for racism.

Late in the play, Daisy secures tickets to see Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in Atlanta. During a heated conversation on the drive over, Hoke is feeling some resentment toward her for not inviting him to go with her—he recognizes that, despite their budding friendship, Daisy still sees him first and foremost as a servant. En route to see Dr. King, Daisy remarks on how things have changed; Hoke replies that they haven’t changed all that much.

Seated at a theater company accused of institutional racism, surrounded by an almost entirely white audience, watching a politically limp show that coddles and reassures whiteness, the irony of this scene was almost too much for this white critic to stand. At America’s Oldest Theatre, America’s oldest institution prevails.