‘Driving Miss Daisy' opens Friday at American Stage in St. Petersburg

BY JOHN FLEMING

Times Performing Arts Critic

ST. PETERSBURG — Ann Morrison and Bob Devin Jones will be "playing old'' in Driving Miss Daisy, the Alfred Uhry play about Daisy Werthan, a 72-year-old Jewish widow in Atlanta, and her chauffeur, Hoke Coleburn, a black man of about 60.

"When they called and asked me to do Miss Daisy, I asked, 'Aren't I a little young to do Miss Daisy?' I'm 54,'' Morrison says. "Then they told me Dana Ivey was 46 when she originated the role. So then I asked, 'Aren't I a little old for Miss Daisy?' ''

In the American Stage production, Morrison won't go to great lengths to add years to her looks. "I don't think we're going to do a lot of heavy makeup,'' she says. "It's really about the acting, the story. We'll have gray hair, but it's more about attitude.''

Jones, 55, will draw mainly upon Hoke's idiosyncratic speech patterns to make the character believable. "Hoke does not speak like any other character I've ever done, and it took a while just to get the rhythm,'' he says. "Once you find the rhythm of that speech, you find the character.''

Uhry is from Atlanta and based Driving Miss Daisy on his growing up Jewish in the segregated city in the 1940s and '50s. The play was the first in his "Atlanta trilogy" that also includes The Last Night of Ballyhoo and the musical Parade.

As a movie starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, Driving Miss Daisy won four Academy Awards, including best picture, in 1989.

"I didn't want to look at the movie,'' Morrison says of preparing for the American Stage production. "I saw it years and years ago when it first came out. But we wanted to find our way of telling it. I didn't want to be influenced by the movie.''

Jones, artistic director of the Studio@620 in St. Petersburg, has a long resume as an actor, but he hasn't been on stage a lot in recent years. He's been doing more directing, including a pair of August Wilson plays, Gem of the Ocean and King Hedley II, for American Stage. His most recent acting roles were as a corporate executive in Permanent Collection at the studio in 2007 and as Don John in Much Ado About Nothing for American Stage in the Park in 2004.

He has never seen the play nor the movie of Driving Miss Daisy, and he didn't have a particularly good impression of Hoke as a character. In fact, he turned down the role when it was first offered to him by director T. Scott Wooten. Jones thought the chauffeur was an Uncle Tom sort of figure, and the play was a sentimental treatment of black-white relations in the South.

"The noble Negro. I didn't think I was up for that,'' he says.

But then Jones read Uhry's play. "Hoke is not an Uncle Tom,'' he says. "In fact, in the tradition of Southern tales, he's more like Brer Rabbit. He knows these folks much better than they know him. When I read the play, I thought this could be a very good night in the theater, because you see some real people. It could be misconstrued as a lot of hokum, but it isn't.''

To be sure, Driving Miss Daisy has its glib charms, but Jones finds a subtle depth in the unlikely friendship it portrays. "Some people will just see it as an old white woman and an old black man driving her around, but it's a quintessential American play.''

John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.