By Fine Arts Center, pay-what-you-wish performance 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, preview 7:30 p.m. Thursday, opens Feb. 5, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 21, Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St., $15 student rush tickets available one hour before the show, $20-$30 preview show, $20-$42; 635-5581, csfineartscenter.org

Nobody was more surprised about the success of Alfred Uhry’s 1987 Pulitzer prize-winning play “Driving Miss Daisy” than Uhry himself.

The playwright based the three-person script on his childhood in Atlanta, using family members as the basis for the elderly Jewish character Daisy and her son Boolie and his grandmother’s black chauffeur as inspiration for the Hoke character.

“It was a family memoir,” Uhry said in a 2010 interview with the website Broadway.com, “and I didn’t think it would have much appeal to anyone who wasn’t familiar with Atlanta in those days.”

But appeal it did.

After productions popped up across the world, the play went on to receive a successful Hollywood treatment in 1989 starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. It won four Academy awards, including best picture, best actress and best screenplay, which Uhry also wrote.

The show opens at the Fine Arts Center on Feb. 5. A pay-what-you-wish performance is Wednesday and a preview performance is Thursday.

When 72-year-old Daisy crashes her car, Boolie decides it’s time to hire her a driver. Enter Hoke.

They spend the next 25 years, from 1948-1973, living through the breakdown of segregation, the rise of the civil rights movement and the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy. Through the decades they learn to love each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

“The characters are so endearing,” says director Scott RC Levy, executive director of performing arts and producing artistic director at the FAC. “It is the backdrop of the civil rights movement. It’s the backdrop of religious understanding because Daisy is Jewish. It’s the backdrop of how we change as we age as the play spans 25 years, but more than anything it’s a beautiful story of how two people deal with each other and become great friends.”

Billie McBride, last seen in the FAC’s production of “4,000 Miles,” stars as Daisy; national and regional actor Joseph W. Lane (“Hack,” “Homicide: Life on the Street”) stars as Hoke and Steve Emily plays Boolie.

“There’s a great line that Hoke says about how, ‘Things changing but they ain’t changed all that much,'” says Levy. “There’s some truth in that still here in 2016. To some degree you leave the theater with a greater sense of compassion for your fellow man and also the trials and tribulations of living in the 20th century.”

JENNIFER MULSON, THE GAZETTE, 636-0270, JEN.MULSON@GAZETTE.COM