Jones, Redgrave in Driving Miss Daisy

NEW YORK (AP) — A pair of theater veterans will be taking a ride to the Great White Way this fall.

Tony Award-winners James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave will co-star in the Broadway premiere of Driving Miss Daisy.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Alfred Uhry will begin performances on Oct. 7 at the John Golden Theatre, with an official opening on Oct. 25, announced producers Jed Bernstein and Adam Zotovich last Tuesday.

It will be directed by David Esbjornson (The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?).     

Redgrave has previously been seen on Broadway in her Tony

award-winning performance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and, most recently, in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in 2007.

Jones won Tonys for The Great White Hope and the original Broadway production of Fences.

Driving Miss Daisy tells of a widowed, 72-year-old Jewish woman living in mid-20th-century Atlanta whose son hires an African-American man to serve as her chauffeur. Friction, then friendship results from their relationship.

Originally opening in an Off-Broadway production in 1987, it became a hit film two years later starring Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy. Among its four Academy Awards, the film won playwright Uhry an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.