About the Play:

Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play.

Driving Miss Daisy is a full-length comedic drama by multi-award-winning writer Alfred Uhry. A warm-hearted, humorous and totally irresistible story of the unlikely friendship twenty-five years in the making between an aging, crotchety white Southern widow of wealth, and a patient, soft-spoken African-American chauffeur. Driving Miss Daisy is a classic comedy-drama that makes issues of social justice accessible with its charm and intimate power.

Driving Miss Daisy is the loving and lovable story of an elderly Jewish matron in mid-century Atlanta who begrudgingly agrees to give up her car keys and allow herself to be chauffeured by an African-American driver. The place is the Deep South, the time 1948, just prior to the civil rights movement. Having recently demolished another car, Daisy Wertham, a rich, sharp-tongued widow of seventy-two, is informed by her son, Boolie, that henceforth she must rely on the services of a chauffeur. The person he hires for the job is a thoughtful, unemployed black man, Hoke, whom Miss Daisy immediately regards with disdain and who, in turn, is not impressed with his employer's patronizing tone and, he believes, her latent prejudice. But, in a series of absorbing scenes spanning twenty-five years, the two, despite their mutual differences, grow ever closer to, and more dependent on, each other, until, eventually, they become almost a couple. Slowly and steadily the dignified, good-natured Hoke breaks down the stern defences of the ornery old lady, as she teaches him to read and write and, in a gesture of good will and shared concern, invites him to join her at a banquet in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. As the play ends Hoke has a final visit with Miss Daisy, now ninety-seven and confined to a nursing home, and while it is evident that a vestige of her fierce independence and sense of position still remain, it is also movingly clear that they have both come to realize they have more in common than they ever believed possible – and that times and circumstances would ever allow them to publicly admit.

His first play, Driving Miss Daisy was a long-run Off-Broadway success and an Academy Award-winning film. It opened off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons Theatre in New York in 1987 and moved subsequently to the John Houseman Theatre, where it ran for three years and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The play enjoyed widespread acceptance among leading regional theatres, and has become a popular choice for school and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 women, 3 men

What people say:

"The play is sweet without being mawkish, ameliorative, without being sanctimonious." — New York Times

"…a perfectly poised and shaped miniature on the odd-couple theme." — New York Post

"…a winner … gives off a warm glow of humane affirmation." — Variety

"Its restraint and plain common sense seem a near miracle." — Wall Street Journal

"Driving Miss Daisy is a total delight." — New York Daily News

About the Playwright:

Alfred Uhry is an American playwright, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is the only playwright ever to win the Triple Crown: an Academy Award, Tony Award (2) and the Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing. He is best known as the author of Driving Miss Daisy, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 1990 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adaptation of a Screenplay.