Dominique Morisseau’s trenchant and moving drama Sunset Baby was first produced a decade ago, before the events of Ferguson, Missouri, or the #BlackLives Matter movement or even the death of Afeni Shakur, the Black Panther leader (and mother of rapper Tupac Shakur) whose life and work seems like a loose inspiration for some of the events. But in a fleet 100 minutes, Morisseau creates an indelible portrait of people whose lives were shaped, and hardened, by a revolutionary impulse that sputtered out — as well as by the pressures of surviving today as Black people in an unforgiving urban landscape.

Director Steve H. Broadnax III’s heart-tugging revival, which opened Tuesday at Off Broadway’s Signature, makes a strong case for Morisseau as a worthy successor to August Wilson in its incisive depiction of the Black experience. Here, she seems to be offering a 21st-century update of The Piano Lesson in which the characters debate what to do with an unusual family heirloom: hand-written and unsent letters from a now-deceased former Black revolutionary figure named Ashanti X to her husband, Kenyatta Shakur, imprisoned for years for robbing an armored truck but seen as a political prisoner due to his work in the Black Liberation Movement. Scholars and publishers are clamoring for this cache of correspondence, these “notes on the revolution,” but when Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby) approaches his long-estranged daughter, Nina (Moses Ingram), about what she plans to do with her inheritance, she flatly refuses to even show them to him.

As brilliantly brought to life by Hornsby and Ingram, Kenyatta and Nina are mirror images of each other, studies in hardness with a thin veneer of placidity that can be all too easily punctured. Each has been beaten down by the system, slow to build connections, and hesitant to open up about their feelings — which both seem to struggle to access in any case. Ingram is sensational as Nina, a woman still mourning the death of her mother, a heroic figure who succumbed to drugs in the end, even as she struggles to put her own life in order. When she drops her mask of toughness to reveal the wounded soul beneath, she convincingly reveals the hidden depths of her character. After all, this is a whip-smart woman who put her college dreams on hold and finds herself working the streets for a local drug dealer (J. Alphonse Nicholson), who himself is hoping to get out of the game if he can only set aside a big enough stash for Nina and himself to escape.

Morisseau sketches these characters with exquisite attention to detail, to the ways that individuals are torn between noble impulses and their baser, more immediate desires and needs. Each has the capacity to change, and at times even the desire, but finds themself coming up short at some crucial moment. Experience has taught them that trust may be the most elusive emotion of all.