Risk is all relative, and when you are a new company like the Plaza Theatre, which has been feeding its patrons a steady diet of musical revues, switching gears to a Pulitzer Prize-winning comic drama can be seen as risk-taking.

That is what the Manalapan company has done, producing a very credible version of Alfred Uhry’s 1987 “Driving Miss Daisy,” a sentimental yarn about an unlikely friendship that grows between a crotchety old Jewish woman and a proud, though illiterate African-American man hired to be her chauffeur.

The Plaza has not only raised the bar for its theatrical menu, but it has attracted an attention-getting caliber of actors and a first-rate director for the show, which continues through Nov. 18. The production is in good hands with Harriet Oser, John Archie and Ken Clement in the cast and Michael Leeds at the helm.

Just as A.R. Gurney has cornered the market on plays of the WASP culture in upstate New York, Uhry (“The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” “Parade”) has made his name writing about the Jews of Atlanta. Prime among them is the title character of his most popular work, 72-year-old Daisy Werthan, the surviving matriarch of a well-to-do southern clan, a woman of stubborn determination and a reflex prejudice against blacks.

The play opens with a bang, or rather the sound of a crash. Daisy (Oser) has shifted her car into reverse instead of drive, totaling the vehicle and causing her son Boolie (Clement) to hire a driver, Hoke Coleburn (Archie), for her. Slowly and reluctantly she accepts this imposed dependence and, over the course of twenty-five years from 1948 to 1973, an unlikely bond of friendship forms between them.

The strength of “Driving Miss Daisy” is in its interpersonal story, but what kicks it up to Pulitzer level is the way Uhry parallels the relationship of Daisy and Hoke with developments in the civil rights movement, Atlanta division.

Leeds makes no effort to impose any directorial concepts on the play, preferring instead to rely on the script and to guide his three actors through the work’s gentle arc, highlighting small touching moments along the way.

Oser has the title role, but this Plaza Theatre production belongs to Archie, who projects a layered, dimensional portrait of a man of great dignity who has learned the value of subservience around white people. His Hoke may be lacking in book learning, but we can see his mind working, weighing his options, at every turn. Oser has long been the area’s go-to choice for roles of women of a certain age and she inhabits Daisy with gusto. From her initial cantankerous reticence about Hoke through to the play’s final moments, as Daisy is seen frail and disoriented, Oser impresses.

The play’s third wheel, Daisy’s son Boolie, takes a supporting place in the evening, but Clement makes us care about his exasperated attempts at stewarding his mother, becoming a focus of audience identification. Most productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” underplay the scenic design, yet Paul Thomas comes up with a simple, effective, attractive set of three distinct playing areas.

The Plaza audience apparently prefers musical entertainments, or at least that is what the sparse turnout on a weekend night suggests. But the company takes a step up artistically with this admirable “Driving Miss Daisy.”