Driving Miss Daisy is a play that’s guilty of schmaltz and a dose of naivete. But it’s hard not to find it endearing, especially as produced by the Arena Players. It’s a modest, sweet production, with three excellent performances and some idiosyncrasies that manage to both confuse and delight. It’s a good night out, in other words, at the oldest continuously running African-American theater in the country.

With a cast of just three, the play gets its snap from the back-and-forth dynamic between the crabby Jewish widow Daisy Werthan (Joan Corcoran) and her affable African-American chauffeur Hoke Coleburn (Randolph Smith), with Miss Daisy’s middle-aged son Boolie (played to the height of Southern gentility by Richard Peck) as their sighing, head-shaking intermediary. The story, set in Atlanta, is told in a series of vignettes that follow the characters through a quarter-century of social transformation in the Deep South.

After the 72-year-old Miss Daisy wrecks her new car backing into a neighbor’s garage, Boolie decides that his mother needs a driver whether she wants one or not (she emphatically does not). He hires Hoke, who’s not inclined to take “no” for an answer, even from a woman for whom “no” is a way of life. Hoke is as determined to help Miss Daisy as she is to help herself, and there is just enough friction between them to generate some light along with all that heat. By the end of the play, they’ve reached a place that’s distinctly different from where they started so many years before; finally, the car is in drive instead of reverse. But first come a few dozen bumps in the road.

If the play’s race-based ironies are less immediately funny than they once were, it’s because modern-day audiences will find it both more and less difficult to recognize how odd this couple is: more, because we’re further removed from the society being explored on stage, and less, because the Reluctant Interracial Partnership has been a comedic trope for so long. Boolie’s frustration in dealing with his bullheaded mother, though, is as relatable as ever. Racial bigotry will continue to fade, one hopes; the stubborn independence of the elderly will always be with us.

Corcoran, who is a gem, brings a little front-porch grit—a little Baltimore—to her Miss Daisy that’s missing from Jessica Tandy’s patrician flower of the film version. But Miss Daisy is rarely despicable, even when she suspects Hoke of stealing a 33-cent can of salmon from her pantry. She’s hardly spoken the first knowing utterances about black people when Hoke appears, apologizes for his snack, and furnishes a replacement can—before Miss Daisy can have the satisfaction of accusing him. As her latent racial anxieties come to the fore in this scene, the subsequent embarrassment she feels adds to the sense that she’s more paranoid than prejudiced, content to hide in her insecurities until Hoke, often without meaning to, makes them visible. In a deceptively difficult role, Arena Players mainstay Smith not only delivers Hoke’s zingers with great timing, he communicates Hoke’s dignity, and the demand for it to be recognized, with a gentle hand.

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