Note: This production was reviewed via pre-recorded video streaming (of a taped 2013 performance) to a movie theater and not in person.
Alfred Uhry’s three best-known plays are all based on his family history. The Last Night of Ballyhoo was about the social life of Jews in his home town of Atlanta. Parade concerned the murder committed at his family’s pencil factory in 1913 which led to the lynching of Leo Frank, an employee of the family. Driving Miss Daisy is about Uhry’s grandmother and the black man who was hired to chauffeur her when she became too feeble to drive herself.
This trilogy comprises a major confluence of history and theater. Yet I wondered how this sentimental look at the civil rights era would hold up almost three decades after it won a Pulitzer Prize during its off-Broadway run and an Academy Award for its movie version. (In October 2010, James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave starred in a revival of the play that was the show’s Broadway debut.)
This clashing of wills between a stubborn matriarch and a proud black man starts slowly yet gains power as the two become friends and face challenges such as the bombing of Miss Daisy’s synagogue and the emergence of Martin Luther King. The pace is so stately that it requires great acting to connect with us. And it certainly does receive that.
The production benefits by the high-definition streaming to movie theaters. An Australian engagement placed Angela Lansbury into the role of Miss Daisy and was recorded for cinema screenings which just began this month. The close-up facial expressions of Jones and Lansbury transmit feelings that transcend the words on the script’s pages. Lansbury especially is touching as the aging woman who grew up facing discrimination because of her Judaism, although she could try to escape bigotry by assimilating into the Southern culture while black people were denied that option.
Lansbury was age 85 at the time of this taping and is at the top of her craft. She displays strength and humor before she reaches the scenes of her old age where she must portray feebleness. Her warmth surpasses the effect that Redgrave had on Broadway. Jones has his expected forcefulness and Boyd Gaines is fine as Miss Daisy’s son.
