Manhattan has been ground zero for finance and real estate for centuries, an idea that is at the heart of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s provocative new drama Manahatta, which opened Tuesday at the Public Theater. Nagle’s brilliant premise is to recount two historic real estate transactions of the past and present (or, at least, the very recent pass): the Lenape people’s so-called sale of Manhattan to Peter Minuit and the Dutch East India Company in 1626 and the collapse of Manhattan-based investment banks like Lehman Brothers as the value of subprime mortgages suddenly collapsed in 2008.

Under Laurie Woolery’s seamless direction, we move fluidly between these two timelines and encounter parallel characters among the agile seven-person cast. Jeffrey King plays both Minuit and Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers who as oblivious to the ticking tranche bombs of faulty mortgages as Minuit was to the bubble in tulip prices (and to how land ownership was a truly foreign concept to the Lenape people). Joe Tapper doubles as ousted Lehman CFO Joe Gregory as well as a mid-level Dutch colonialist who harbors some sympathies with his Lenape trading partners. (Marcelo Martínez García’s set, with its mirrored back wall and foreground boulders, and Lux Haac’s costumes straddle the line between past and present in striking ways that underscore the play’s duality.)

We also meet a Lenape family that struggles to make sense of white men who present themselves as both partners and oppressors. Elizabeth Frances stands out in both timelines as an assertive young woman who is eager to get to know these interlopers, in the past as a trader on par with her male tribe members who learns the white language and in the present as a Stanford-educated MBA who becomes one of the first native women to land a job at a top Wall Street firm. (Her career somewhat mimics that of Erin Callan, a non-native, non-MBA who served a super-short tenure as Lehman’s last CFO.) She longs to do right for herself, and for her people, though her family back home both recognizes and resents her accomplishments — and the sense of separation that her hard-charging career entails.

That burden is borne both by her sister (Rainbow Dickerson) and especially her mother (Shelia Tousey, bringing a magnetic earth-mother vibe), who has secretly taken out a risky mortgage on the family home in Oklahoma to pay off her late husband’s $60,000 medical debt. This is an elder who is proud to the point of stubbornness, who curiously shies away from joining her daughter’s Lenape language program to keep the tribe’s linguistic heritage alive. More bizarrely, she also hides the fact that she’s fallen behind in her new mortgage payments — a development that the local banker/pastor (David Kelly) and his adoptive son (Enrico Nassi) also decline to share with her daughters, apparently out of respect for her elder status.

While this plot point seems more convenient than plausible, it does set up a moving final speech by Tousey that reinforces how she, like the Lenape and other First Nations people, do not believe they can ever really claim ownership of the land they occupy. “Every time they make us leave,” she says, “we carry our home with us.” It’s a powerful message, powerfully delivered in a drama that explores timely questions about the misunderstandings built into our American history and the ways in which we seem to exacerbate those errors even today.