A Home-grown Daisy Blooms

THEATER

Compared with the symphonic boom of, say, Les Miserables or Cats, Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy is graceful, charming, and resolutely small. It is chamber music, the sort of piece an eighteenth-century composer might have written on commission, a trio for two virtuosos and their competent friend. Dana Ivey plays an elderly Jewish woman in Atlanta whose son hires her a driver after she backs her car over the neighbor's toolshed. As the chauffeur, Morgan Freeman is the sonorous cello to Ivey's capricious, incisive violin (in the role of her son, Ray Gill is the supportive viola). Their lines are funny and touching, their delivery superb. After a sold-out limited run at the small upstairs theater at New York's Playwrights Horizons, the play has just reopened in a larger house with the same cast.

Although the only music in Daisy is incidental, the musical comparison isn't so farfetched. Uhry has written song lyrics and books for musicals for almost three decades. This is his first play. "When I was writing musicals," he says, "I felt it wasn't my own voice. Here I was writing out of my own life." Raised in Atlanta, he says many of his female relatives used chauffeurs—including his grandmother, who had an encounter with a toolshed very like Miss Daisy's.

Uhry moved to New York in 1959, when he was hired as a lyricist for Frank Loesser's music-publishing company. From the master he learned economy of phrase. Having learned about economy of income in the musical theater, Uhry is thrilled that, with his success as a dramatist, television and movie producers are summoning him for meetings. "It feels good to be the man of the half-second," he says.

John Houseman Theater Center. New York.

ARTHUR LUBOW