Palm Beach Dramaworks: Why ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ Still Matters

 

 

U.S. social history has often been a tale of “those people”—one ethnic group, once at the bottom of the totem pole, eventually finding a new group to turn on as its next victim. Two minority groups who have long shared struggle and tension are African Americans and Jewish Americans. Theirs has been a bittersweet encounter: common ground in the fight against prejudice, yet also moments of misunderstanding and conflict.

 

I found myself wondering how the now seemingly antiquated themes of Driving Miss Daisy would resonate in a world where “Americanism” has become, in some quarters, an excuse for government-supported hostility toward immigrants and minorities. The Palm Beach Dramaworks production leans into the play’s fundamentally humane spirit, suggesting, perhaps optimistically, that there is still hope in confronting the rise of a reinvented Christian nationalism and the social instability it has brought with it.

 

So, to answer the question of whether one should see this production of Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, even if one has seen it before: a resounding yes. Three excellent actors, combined with a thoughtful and skilled production, make Driving Miss Daisy feel especially meaningful in the present moment. 

 

A brief disclaimer: I admit to a personal bias. My wife, Ann, grew up in Atlanta and was a firsthand witness to many of the social attitudes depicted in the play. She acted in high school, playing alongside Dana Ivey (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), who would later originate the role of Daisy Werthan in the original Playwrights Horizons production.

 

The plot traces some twenty-five years, beginning in 1948, in the life of Daisy Werthan, a wealthy Jewish widow in Atlanta. Her son, Boolie, hires a chauffeur for her—Hoke—over her strenuous objections. While Hoke’s being Black certainly matters, Daisy’s fierce independence and legendary frugality are just as central to her resistance. Still, the racial and religious climate of the Deep South quietly but firmly dictates the behavior of everyone involved.

Debra Jo Rupp, Matthew W. Korinko-Jason Nuttle Photography

 

Boolie’s desire for social and business success leads him to suppress his Jewish identity—most notably through his elaborate Christmas displays (encouraged by his offstage wife, Florine, who becomes a perpetual target of Daisy’s scorn) and his refusal to publicly support Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for fear of social and professional consequences. Daisy, however, gradually comes to resist this kind of cultural erasure. These overlapping layers of prejudice, assimilation, and tradition provide the essential context for the evolving relationship between the Werthans and Hoke.

 

Boolie is played by the ever-versatile Matthew W. Korinko, whose many past PBD performances have shown his particular strengths—especially his expressive voice and instinct for both humor and emotional shading. His affection for Daisy is evident not only in hiring Hoke to keep her safe, but in his patience with her many idiosyncrasies and her constant mishegas. Their exchanges supply much of the play’s dry, wry humor.

Debra Jo Rupp and Ray Anthony Thomas-Jason Nuttle Photography

 

But the emotional center of the production belongs to Debra Jo Rupp as Daisy and Ray Anthony Thomas as Hoke. Their casting reflects a broader trend toward recognizable names in intimate, two- or three-character plays, and both are well known from television and film, though also seasoned stage actors. They seem ideally matched to their roles. Watching their characters evolve over twenty-five plus years is both moving and absorbing—a study in mutual growth, as the power structures of their era gradually dissolve, leaving behind two people who finally recognize each other as equals. Daisy’s journey from stubborn self-sufficiency to reluctant vulnerability mirrors Hoke’s own path toward dignity and self-assurance.

 

There are countless tender moments. Rupp is especially evocative in a monologue recalling Daisy’s childhood memory of seeing the ocean for the first time:

 

“Papa said it was the Gulf of Mexico, and not the ocean, but it was all the same to me… I asked Papa if it was all right to dip my hand in the water… I tasted the salt water on my fingers. Isn’t it silly to remember that?”

 

Thomas’s response, delivered with his trademark gentle humor, is equally touching:

 

“No sillier than most of what folks remember. You talkin’ ’bout first time? I’ll tell you ’bout first time I ever leave the state of Georgia.”

 

Daisy innocently asks, “When was that?”

 

Hoke replies: “’Bout twenty-five minutes back.”

 

Moments like these—small, intimate, and quietly profound—are what give Driving Miss Daisy its enduring emotional power.

 

In the hands of the director, Julianne Boyd, and cast, the bombing of Daisy’s Reform Temple becomes an emotional fulcrum of the play. Daisy cannot quite believe it happened because her Temple is Reform, not conservative or orthodox. Here, the pace and the plaintive reply of Hoke carry the audience into a place one does not expect:

 

Hoke: “It doan’ matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes’ like light or dark we all the same nigger.”

 

Responding to Daisy’s disbelief, Ray Anthony Thomas delivers a stunning, nuanced monologue, straight from the gut:

 

“I know jes’ how you feel, Miz Daisy. Back down there above Macon on the farm—I ’bout ten or ’leven years old and one day my frien’ Porter, his daddy hangin’ from a tree. And the day befo’ he laughin’ and pitchin’ horseshoes wid us. Talkin’ ’bout Porter and me gon have strong god right arms like him, and den he hangin’ up yonder wid his hands tied behind his back and the flies all over him. And I seed it with my own eyes and I throw up right where I standin’.”

 

Daisy challenges him: “Ridiculous! The Temple has nothing to do with that!”

 

Hoke replies quietly: “So you say.”

 

Daisy knows, of course, but is just too blind at the time to see it. The audience feels it profoundly. I personally recalled Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit.”

 

One of the play’s most compelling features is its kaleidoscopic treatment of time, compressing decades of social history into a series of short, impactful scenes. The steady transformation of both society and the characters unfolds quietly but inexorably before the audience, even if the transitions can sometimes feel abrupt. 

 

The temper of the times is beautifully supported by the production design.

 

Brian O’Keefe’s costume designs are masterful, with changes that mark the passing of time. Daisy in particular morphs from typical late 1940s dress at home in the opening, to scenes with her in a fur stole going to Temple, and finally to the clothing of a ninety-year-old being cared for in an assisted living facility.

 

Alexander Sovronsky’s sound design (PBD debut) includes riffs from popular music that help denote time’s inexorable march while enhancing the emotional texture of the production. It begins, most appropriately, with “Georgia on My Mind,” and amusingly includes “Santa Baby” when Daisy visits Boolie’s overly decorated home at Christmas—a hollow holiday to Daisy, given her family is Jewish and her son, and especially her daughter-in-law Florine, are trying to pass as Christian in order to blend into Atlanta society and their country club. Sound also includes the opening and closing of the imaginary car doors, and the running of the engine, so perfectly timed that the audience can “see” those doors.

 

Bert Scott’s simple yet imaginative scenic design is representational, a blank slate used to suggest the three primary locations: the Werthan family home, the automobile, and Boolie’s office (with, further stage left, a telephone on a pedestal to represent Boolie at his home). Lighting design by John Wolf (PBD debut) is dictated by which portion of the stage holds the action and by the time of day.

 

Above the stage, the “windows” are where Tim Brown’s projection design (PBD debut) appears, offering outside scenes ranging from open sky to destinations such as Piggly Wiggly, Daisy’s Temple, the Christmas decorations of Boolie’s home, headstones in a cemetery as Daisy tends her husband’s grave, and even images from Martin Luther King’s appearance at Atlanta’s UJA Banquet, which Daisy attends but fails to invite Hoke to join.

 

The winding down of the play is bittersweet. Aging is a fact of life, but this unlikely pair, a wealthy Jewish widow in Atlanta, of all places, who finally recognizes her uneducated chauffeur as her “best friend,” arrives at something quietly profound. Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production goes even further, making us feel that their bond resembles that of an old married couple. There is love. This heartwarming production is delicate rather than sweeping, inspirational rather than didactic.

 

Ray Anthony Thomas and Debra Jo Rupp-Jason Nuttle Photography

Living at the End of Time: On Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

  

The enigmatic title of Ian McEwan’s latest novel might more accurately be phrased as a question: What can we know? How are we to understand the world we inhabit, except by extrapolating the venality and compromises of the present? And what better medium for such an inquiry than fiction?

 

While reading What We Can Know, I could not shake the memory of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.  Each work is an intellectual high-wire act, in which one generation of scholars attempts to reconstruct the lives of an earlier one from fragmentary evidence—documents, marginalia, artifacts that have outlived their creators. Where Stoppard’s characters look back two centuries, McEwan’s scholars inhabit the early twenty-second century and look back at us. Both works are haunted by the same ghostly reciprocity: one generation watching another, unknowingly observed in return.

 

McEwan’s novel is not science fiction in any sensational sense. It feels instead like a plausible extension of the world we already know—a future shaped by environmental neglect and geopolitical recklessness, their consequences long deferred and then catastrophically realized. Europe has splintered into archipelagos; America has devolved into a feudal landscape ruled by warlords; and what remains of human knowledge is preserved in remote libraries and through the aptly named “Nigerian Internet Network.” The novel operates as a layered cautionary tale, not least in its treatment of privacy. We, clinging to the illusion that encryption and passwords protect us, are gently mocked by a future narrator who knows better:

 

“I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, just whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard on the screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”

 

By the mid-2030s, the term “the Derangement” comes into common usage, a litany of climate catastrophe—its effects so often rehearsed that they weary activists and skeptics alike. The phrase carries an added implication: a collective cognitive failure, our bias toward short-term comfort over long-term survival. Humanity itself is deranged. More quietly still, belief in progress collapses, along with belief in a future.

 

By the mid-twenty-first century, the world confronts what the novel chillingly calls “the fatal concept of limited nuclear war.” A poorly engineered Russian missile, aimed at the southern United States, detonates prematurely in the mid-Atlantic, triggering tsunamis that devastate Europe, West Africa, and the eastern seaboard of North America. Suspicion that the blast may have been deliberate pushes the world to the brink of retaliation before a fragile peace is hastily imposed.

 

If this sounds fantastical, it does not read that way. McEwan writes with such assurance and precision that the imagined future feels less like prophecy than consequence. He is very much at the height of his powers, able to compress centuries into a sentence, as when he observes that “the mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind, and rain on limestone cliffs.”

 

Yet all of this is prologue. The heart of the novel lies with two future scholars, Professors Thomas Metcalfe and Rose Church, among the dwindling number of literary historians in a world that now overwhelmingly favors the sciences over the humanities. Their shared obsession is a legendary 2014 poem by Francis Blundy, one of the great poets of the early twenty-first century: Corona for Vivian, written for his wife, Vivian. Blundy is likened to T. S. Eliot—“both poets had a Vivian in their lives…and a comfortable kind of English existence that masked turmoil and carelessness with the lives of others.” Only one copy of the poem is known to exist, handwritten on parchment for Vivian’s birthday.

 

The lives of Thomas and Rose in the twenty-second century are subtly braided with those of Francis and Vivian a century earlier. Thomas becomes so absorbed in Vivian’s story that he might be said to fall in love with her. Reflecting on his research into what came to be known as the “Second Immortal Dinner,” where the poem was first read in 2014, echoing the famous 1817 gathering attended by Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, Thomas observes:

 

“If I look up from my papers… I can’t believe that I’m in a dream, and that my waking reality is within the pages of my hands… I could’ve been there. I am there. I know all that they do—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful… Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love.”

 

The emotional and sexual vitality of Francis and Vivian’s world stands in stark contrast to the diminished lives of Thomas and Rose. If McEwan is passing judgment, it may be here: seize the day. The novel is at once a mystery as well as of murder, infidelity, and secrecy, and a meditation on love in its many forms. It is a work of suspense, but also of tenderness, beautifully composed and deeply felt.

 

The twenty-first-century sections teem with characters and subplots; the twenty-second is spare, almost austere, survival having displaced social abundance. Yet even amid catastrophe, life continues, if with reduced expectations. Outrage follows outrage; democracy erodes; and still people cook, teach, love, and endure. McEwan’s structure reinforces this vision: a first part that moves restlessly across time, followed by a second composed almost entirely of Vivian’s journal.

 

Until then, Vivian has existed largely in outline—as Francis’s devoted wife. Her journal transforms her into something richer and more autonomous. She recounts her intellectual formation, her first marriage to Percy, and her long-standing love affair with Francis’s brother-in-law, Harry—also Francis’s publisher. The journal is exquisitely written and becomes, through Thomas’s dogged persistence, recovered from a time capsule.

 

It also gives McEwan license to write some of his most piercing passages. After Vivian and Francis’s relationship becomes public, Francis publishes Feasting, a poetry collection that includes a love cycle devoted to her. Against all expectations, it becomes a bestseller and is later adapted into a film. Vivian finds herself transformed—first exposed, then abstracted, finally erased into symbol. McEwan captures this with surgical precision:

 

“I felt sliced open and pinned wide for public inspection, like a dissected frog….I did not complain, and later, I was glad I hadn’t, for this was a vanishing process. It was me when I saw the proof, then me and not me when I saw my first finished copy, until finally, diluted and disseminated in multiple thousands of printed versions of myself, I faded into the typeface, and it was no longer me at all.  What remained was not even a woman, but a poetic convention, the shadow of a woman on the cave walls of a man’s imagination.“

 

To avoid spoilers, I will end this impression (“review” feels too exhaustive) abruptly. Whether that time capsule also contains the full text of Corona for Vivian is best left to the reader. For me, the novel’s deepest truth lies in Thomas’s reflection near the end:

 

“Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this is what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending—or, Vivian, Rose, and I—teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk [a literary superstar of the 2030s], and the rest…. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less…. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”

 

To give Vivian’s journal, The Confessions of Vivian Blundy, its final measure of verisimilitude, McEwan appends a brief note as the end of the novel, one I reproduce below. It is not a spoiler. It simply closes Confessions the way history so often does: with a record, not an explanation.