Samm-Art Williams’s lyrical memory play Home first played on Broadway in 1980, just a few years after Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf and the two plays shared a similar poetic flare that tapped into authentic depictions of the Black experience in the period just after the civil rights movement. The hero of Home is a North Carolina native named Cephus Miles, who joins the diaspora of Blacks from the South to the Northern cities but finds himself drawn back to his his native well-tilled farm soil to discover that integration really has taken root there in the time he’s been away.

Director Kenny Leon’s affectionate new revival, which opened Wednesday at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre on Broadway, is like a warm hug to a show that has been unjustly forgotten. Williams, who died last month at age 78, was both an actor and playwright (as well as an executive producer of such shows as Fresh Prince of Bel Air), and his writing has an enticing actorly quality, with mellifluous turns of phrase and juicy narrative digressions. We follow Cephus’s journey from God-fearing farm boy to heart-on-his-sleeve romantic to pacifist rebel (sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to serve in Vietnam) to struggling ex-con in a cold-shouldered Northern city in the 1970s.

Tory Kittles flashes considerable showmanship as Cephus, a natural raconteur in the Will Rogers mold who spins tall tales about his family and rural locals while swatting “mosquitoes as big as turkeys.” Later, he economically conveys the frustrations of the down-on-their-luck Black urban poor forced to take quickie jobs sweeping barroom floors and shining shoes while he himself is stuck wearing “dirty, white knob-toed shoes that have holes in the soles and turned over heels.”

Kittles is well-matched by two other castmates, the remarkable Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers, who easily morph from co-narrators to more than a dozen different roles, from Cephus’s boyhood sweetheart to his disapproving welfare officer (“You’re the case. I’m the worker”) to a variety of lovers and bus drivers and drug pushers and voices of temptation and innocence. Again, Williams has written these roles — called Woman One and Woman Two in the script — as a showcase for actors who can embody multiple distinct personalities with lightning-quick shifts in voice and only the subtlest changes in costuming. Inge and Ayers have developed an easy syncopated rapport, an onstage call-and-response that recalls step-dancing sorority sisters.

Despite Cephus’s Southern roots, you might mistake him for an impatient Northerner with the quick-talking patter that flies out of his mouth like he was speeding down an empty country highway. The lines fly by, sometimes too quick to catch the narrative billboards along the side of the road. Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple but evocative set design transitions just as rapidly from fire-escape-laden cityscape to rocking-chair country porch. The pacing has an added benefit because if you linger too long over Cephus’s picaresque yarn you are liable to dwell on some of its implausibilities and narrative shortcomings — and the ways that it seems to shout a rather retro message of non-threateningness. Even our hero’s brief dalliance with alcohol and drugs (“This is Mary Jane. For those who like their nightmares in color”) could serve as the basis for a “Just say no” PSA. Things eventually look grim, but we never actually fear for his fate.

The lack of grittiness, of anger, is part of the point here. And Williams’s language has a lyricism and authenticity that still holds power even if there’s a throwback quality to his message about how the civil rights movement really did improve the lives of Black Americans, particularly in the South. It’s notable that none of the characters are identified as white — even Cephus’s chief antagonists are Black, tempting him to bad behavior or decrying how his behavior is “bringing down the race.” (It’s hard to imagine that the show would have been such a hit in the late 1970s, or transferred to Broadway, if it carried even a whiff of the Angry Black Man in its underlying message.)

Still, Home may be radical in a broader sense. The play benefits by the ways Williams leans into traditions of African American storytelling to share his experience and to reject some of the messages of his white literary forebears. His hero proves Thomas Wolfe wrong: You can go home again.