There's Driving Miss Daisy. Then there's plowing it into a ditch and wrapping it around a telephone pole.
Alfred Uhry's genteel, Pulitzer-winning character study isn't built for speed, but for emotional traction. No edginess. That would be, say, Rollerblading Miss Daisy.
This intimate socio-drama about an elderly, vinegary Jewish widow and her good-natured black chauffeur down Dixie way spanning the pre-to-post-civil-rights era is sweet and sharp: an examination of humanity and the racial divide with only a smattering of it's-good-for-you preachiness.
But as Las Vegas Little Theatre's season-opener, Daisy is lazy. It's hamstrung by technical sloppiness, autopilot direction and performances that, while competent, even touching, exist nearly in a vacuum, barely grazing each other on any soul-deep level, characters never transcending Uhry's pen to emerge as flesh-and-bone beings.
Not one of its nearly 90, intermission-free minutes evokes the sense of human connectedness that the piece is about.
Obvious lapses torpedo believability. At the performance attended, Barbara Costa's Daisy Werthan perused the R-J. In Georgia, 1948. Daisy's son, Boolie (Anthony Farmer) called home repeatedly. On a cordless phone. In a play concluding in 1973. And Boolie, accepting an award, held aloft what appeared to be a faded brass bowl swiped from a pawn shop.
Couldn't this production—and co-directors Ken and Lee Feldman, usually solid helmers—at least pretend to care about authenticity? You know, those theater basics like make-believe and persuading an audience into suspension of disbelief before you can entertain them?
And in a piece that carries its characters over 25 years—a crucial quarter-century in which a roiling social upheaval molds the play's central relationship—the Feldmans make few allusions to time-passage, beyond frequent fade-outs between scenes. The narrative plays out as if unfolding over a week, rather than, oh, 1,300 of them.
Costa, an actress with chops, summons fire and frailty for Daisy, a snappish old broad whose bitter wit masks a growing fear and loneliness. Grant Harrison is a humble, ingratiating and occasionally tart Hoke Coleburn, Daisy's stoic, loyal driver, though his "yessum" performance dips a bit much into shuck-and-jive. And Farmer's work as Daisy's put-upon son is a one-note samba, a dance of perpetually polite exasperation, modulated only by inflection and expression. (Although, in fairness, Uhry doesn't allow Boolie much depth, deployed mostly as a useful go-between to advance the lead relationship.)
But what finally drags Daisy down is, I suspect, an unfortunate side effect of some plays parlayed into screen hits. Reincarnated as 1989's best picture, Daisy featured Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman giving iconic (and in Tandy's case, Oscar-winning) performances.
That earns any production lingering goodwill among audiences, nearly sewn into the lead performances before actors step onstage. Goodwill on which they can either build or coast, as if a good 10 to 20 percent of their characterizations are already affixed in the public's affections.
Cheated of the arc of their relationship, the play's best moments are minimized: Hoke shocking Daisy by blurting out, "I ain't just the back of a neck you look at whenever you go where you gotta go," challenging her impervious, self-centered nattering; connecting the prejudicial dots between a cross-burning and her temple's bombing; Daisy's harrowing delusions; Daisy uttering: "Hoke, you're my best friend. ... No, really, you are ... You are."
Premium motor oil wasted on a jalopy.
Driving Miss Daisy sputters off the road, emergency blinkers on.
Call a tow. Then call a cab.