Clark Art Screens 'Girlfriends'

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Thursday, Feb. 20, the Clark Art Institute screens the latest installment in its Hollywood Auteurs film series, "Girlfriends" (1978), at 6 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

Presented in partnership with Images Cinema, this series captures the explosion of creativity, critical acclaim, and box office success that Hollywood directors found after the fall of the studio system.

According to a press release: 

When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out of their Manhattan apartment to get married, Susan (Melanie Mayron) finds herself adrift in both life and love. A wonder of American independent cinema by Claudia Weill (who, when she was admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a director in 1981, was one of only four women ever to have received that honor), Girlfriends is a remarkably authentic vision of female relationships that has become a touchstone for makers of an entire subgenre of films and television shows about young women trying to make it in the big city. This 1970s New York time capsule captures the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and relationships with wry humor and refreshing frankness. (Run time: 1 hour, 26 minutes)

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events.

 


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Theater Review: 'Driving Miss Daisy' Is a 'Wondrous' Production

By Alan PetrucelliSpecial to iBerkshires
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Alfred Uhry's "Driving Miss Daisy" rolled into the St. Germain Stage in late May, marking the opening of Barrington Stage Company's 2026 season.
 
And what a wondrous, welcoming production it is. Uhry won a Pulitzer Prize for his work; he won an Oscar for the 1989 film adaptation of the play, which also won the Best Picture Oscar. Yes, that's how good it is.
 
Daisy Werthan is a 72-year-old white Jewish widow in Atlanta whose car accident destroyed her Packard — and her chance to ever drive herself again.
 
"Mama, we are just going to have to hire someone to drive you," her adult son Boolie tells her. 
 
She is adamant: "What I do not want — and absolutely will not have — is some chauffeur sitting in my kitchen, gobbling my food and running up my phone bill."
 
Enter Hoke Colburn, an unemployed African-American illiterate who grew up in rural Georgia during the Jim Crow-era South. Boolie hires him at $20 a week, and in a span of 85 minutes and a decade or so, this odd couple develop a tight bond that overcomes their cultural, gender and class differences. 
 
Though she's living in a racially explosive time in the South, the irascible Miss Daisy doesn't consider herself racist, nor does she fully accept the realities of the racist culture that has even resulted in a bombing at her own synagogue (a true event in Atlanta, in 1958).
 
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