Photo by Keith Stewart
Chauffeur Hoke Colburn (played by Equity actor Bryant Bentley, left), returns a can of salmon, unaware that Miss Daisy (played by Glory Kissel, middle) had just moments before accused him of stealing in a conversation with her son Boolie (played by Jesse Sharp, right).
•August 12, 2015•
By Dan Hagen
NP Theatre Critic
How appropriate that the play “Driving Miss Daisy” should cap the 2015 summer season here, because the venerable Little Theatre is the venue that integrated the town of Sullivan.
“The first African American actor Guy Little hired was an Equity actor from New York, Michael Wright, who, ironically, was from Shelbyville, a somewhat larger town 20 miles southeast of Sullivan,” wrote Beth Conway Shervey in her book, “The Little Theatre on the Square: Four Decades of a Small-Town Equity Theatre.”
“Collective memories of people in Sullivan in 1961 recalled either a sunset law on the books or an unspoken rule that no black man would be caught in Sullivan after the sun went down, much less spend the night,” Shervey wrote. Wright did, of course, staying with a local couple. “Rumor also had select area residents threatening to blow up the theatre or close it down for good. Not only did nothing like this happen, it never rose above gossip.”
Jibby Florini — the owner of Jibby’s restaurant, once the “Sardi’s of Sullivan” — headed off any racial confrontations. “(Wright) came in here, and I had to stop a couple guys from going over and challenging him,” Florini said. “They wanted him thrown out and so on.”
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