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No matter where you grew up, that place always elicits a tangled mix of memories, including sorrows that were often beyond one’s control. That’s certainly true for Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), the Black protagonist of Home who endures a particularly powerless coming of age in lawfully segregated North Carolina. The play, which earned Tony Award-nominated success on Broadway, in 1980, after a critically acclaimed downtown run, was revived Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in 2008 as part of a season-long tribute to the Negro Ensemble Company, the artistic home of Home and its author Samm-Art Williams. Sadly, he passed away right before previews began for his sensitive work’s current and only Broadway reappearance, a beautiful production that has now also turned into a fitting memorial.

The astoundingly multifaceted Williams, who once served as a sparring partner for Muhammad Ali, emotionally rope-a-dopes the audience, initially presenting Miles as a poor, forlorn farmer with nothing but a broken body to show for lots of toil and struggle. At his vulnerable sides, two women (Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers) form a miniature Gospel-cum-Greek Chorus, seemingly poised to keep Miles from slumping to the canvas, if for no other reason than to get in a few more good shots. But, as Miles awkwardly rises from a rickety rocking chair, it quickly becomes obvious that he is, in fact, not going to fall down.

Partial to telling outlandish tales about his upbringing in Cross Roads, an aptly named fictional town where agriculture is king, Miles recalls shooting craps on the pristine cement vaults in the “white folks’ section” of the graveyard and spins a decidedly politically incorrect yarn regarding how he learned to “speak Indian.” The two women chide Miles for these silly digressions, eventually encouraging him to get real about his past and also helping him to make that happen by embodying all the people who were a part of it, including Pattie Mae Wells (Inge), the love of Miles’ life, and his greatest regret, and his redeemer. It’s complicated.

Unlike the ambitious Wells, who heads off to college, Miles resists the pressure to leave Cross Roads, content to spend his days in a community that produced everyone who ever mattered to him, both living and dead. The Vietnam War, however, upends Miles’ stay-at-home dreams, but not in the usual way. Unlike a couple of his doomed buddies, Miles actually refuses to fight, as a result of taking one commandment at uncommonly face value: thou shall not kill. It’s a principled stand that costs him his land and freedom. Then, after a lengthy prison stretch, he also becomes an unwilling participant in the Great Migration, joining the 20th-century tidal wave of Blacks abandoning the South for the promise of better opportunities outside the reach of Jim Crow, especially in Northern cities like New York and Chicago.

Of course, Miles learns that segregation is a baked-in feature of those liberal bastions, too, if just more craftily preserved. Coupled with his criminal record, this less overt form of racism soon sends Miles into a 1970’s spiral of unemployment, substance-abuse, and loneliness on the decaying streets of some unidentified metropolis. If Williams had been tragically inclined that would have been that, with Home concluding as a scathing commentary on the failures of the post-Civil Rights era.

Instead, without an iota of dramaturgical concern, Williams sends Miles back to Cross Roads, where the character once felt a sense of belonging thanks to family and friends. But, that would appear to be impossible now, given that almost everyone he knew has come to regard Miles as a draft dodger. Fortunately for Miles, the playwright doesn’t care. With a huge helping hand from benign fate, Cross Roads becomes Miles’ salvation. To be sure, it’s an idiosyncratic conception of hope, which Williams isn’t really interested in explaining, other than through a preordained punchline about how human beings are left to suffer whenever God takes a vacation.

Respectfully going with the buoyant flow, director Kenny Leon never tries to temper Williams’ optimism, perhaps because the playwright’s outlook doesn’t come from ignoring reality but, touchingly, has somehow survived it. Pugnacious in its own unique way, Williams’ odd positivity overwhelms history’s oppressive weight, making the denouement of Home seem possible. Or, at the very least, you want to believe it.

Leon, who led the long-overdue return of Purlie Victorious to the Broadway spotlight in the fall, repeats that service for Home, though, admittedly, the glare is a bit faded during the summer months. Still, as with that other once underappreciated gem, Leon helms a first-rate production of Home, buttressed again by a talented cast. Inge and Ayers brilliantly utilize Williams’ lavish language to give a bevy of nuanced performances, while Kittles magnificently delivers the playwright’s ornate monologues in a brisk style that left me breathless and Kittles apparently feeling fine.

The actors’ efforts benefit greatly from Arnulfo Maldonado’s supple set, which imaginatively shifts between well-defined urban and rural locations. Dede Ayite’s costumes, meanwhile, blend in nicely across this spectrum, leaving the combination of Allen Lee Hughes’ lighting changes and Justin Ellington’s sound design to gracefully add ethereal notes to the proceedings. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take a couple more generations for Broadway artists to have another chance to be so deeply inspired by Williams’ big-hearted vision.

Home (through July 21, 2024)

Roundabout Theatre Company

Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-719-1300 or visit http://www.roundabouttheatre.org

Running time: one hour and 30 minutes without an intermission