It’s taken six decades to mount the first professional revival of Ossie Davis’s dark comedy Purlie Victorious, which arrives on Broadway in a searing and side-splitting production brilliantly directed by Kenny Leon. The Playbill says the setting is the “Cotton Plantation Country of the Old South” in “the recent past” — and it’s depressingly remarkable how Davis’s swipes at Jim Crow-era racism remain as relevant to audiences in 21st-century America. There’s no mistaking the brilliance of Davis’s script, which challenges racism with sharpness and plays on Black stereotypes while lampooning the attitudes that fuel them.

Leslie Odom Jr., best known for his Tony-winning turn as Aaron Burr in Hamilton, here plays an aspiring Georgia preacher named Purlie Victorious, who returns to his Georgia home with a plan to buy back the local church that’s fallen into disuse among the Black sharecroppers who remain financially and culturally beholden to local cotton plantation owner Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders, accentuating the character’s Southern-fried solipsism to brilliant effect). His scheme involves recruiting a naive but game young woman preposterously named Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara Young) to pose as his college-educated aunt Bee and claim a $500 inheritance promised to Bee’s late mother by the white woman for whom she once worked — a sum that Ol’ Cap’n has been keeping for himself.

Davis’s plot involves a good deal of broad humor over this poorly conceived scheme — but there’s a serious message just beneath the surface that gives even the broadest slapstick a heftier punch. The key comes in Leon’s balanced direction, which leans into both the broad humor and the social message with perfect ease. Purlie’s brother, Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones), promoted by Ol’ Cap’n as an overlord dubbed “Deputy-for-the-Colored), could be seen as an Uncle Tom type — but Jones always makes clear that his shuckin’ and jivin’ to his white boss is a performance that allows him wiggle room to defy orders when it matters. Similarly, Vanessa Bell Calloway explodes the Mammy stereotype as a seemingly submissive domestic who’s forever undermining Ol’ Cap’n.

Odom is sensational as Purlie, channeling a traveling preacher’s patter-style sermonizing while also flashing both cunning and warmth in his scenes with Young, both his apprentice and love interest. His rizz is off the charts. Young, a two-time Tony nominee for weightier plays like Clyde’s and last fall’s Cost of Living, proves herself to be a gifted comedian — with the physicality of a slapstick queen and the exaggerated line deliveries of a stand-up. She also manages the tricky task of appearing both ingenue and vamp, an innocent in a strange new world whose encounters with Purlie unleashes a carnal longing that she’s not afraid to express. It’s a striking and often hilarious juxtaposition.

The strength of Leon’s swiftly paced production — which benefits from Derek McLane’s deceptively simple clapboard-style set, Emilio Sosa’s subtly updated period costumes and Adam Honoré’s subtle lighting — comes in embracing dualities. Even the Ol’ Cap’n turns out to have more dimensions than we might initially have guessed — since Davis’s blend of broad satire and heartfelt sentiment allows for his characters to have hidden depths as well as the capacity to change. But, Purlie Victorious also reminds us that change only comes when bold individuals nudge us forward, however haltingly. Because the forces of progress continue to meet resistance — a message that holds value even 60 years after the play’s premiere at the height of the civil rights movement.

“The South is split like a fat man’s underwear,” Purlie preaches at one point, “and somebody beside the Supreme Court has got to make a stand for the everlasting glory of our people!” Amen to that.