Not since the sixties and seventies, with the black power movement, flowering of Afrocentric scholarship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, novel and mini-series, has there been so much popular interest in the history of slavery.

The play’s brusque, polemical energy feels like a throwback to a different time—perhaps to an earlier version of multiculturalism, one that aspired to trouble the mainstream rather than enter it.