Nearly every historical monodrama pins its hopes upon its subject’s oratorical gifts. These rousing and often transformative passages can come from the page (Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson), a seat of power (Golda Meir, Harry Truman), or even the stage (Paul Robeson, George Burns), but they typically assume the same role that hit songs do in an autobiographical musical revue: This, that, and the other thing happened to me, which led to … this little number.

After an illustrious judicial career that touched upon just about every major development of the civil rights movement, Thurgood Marshall had a sizable paper trail from which to draw — 322 written decisions during his Supreme Court years alone. But as Marshall himself learned in the dispiritingly long wake of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the largest by far of the more than two dozen cases that he successfully argued in front of the Supreme Court before becoming its first African-American member, even seemingly cataclysmic decisions wend their way into reality at their own tempo. (Marshall, at the time an NAACP lawyer, predicted that every school in America would be desegregated within five years of the 1954 decision; he was off by almost a decade.)

George Stevens Jr. has essentially jettisoned this greatest-hits style for his monodrama “Thurgood,” in which the magisterial Laurence Fishburne walks audiences through a predictable but engrossing tour of Marshall’s accomplishments. The sequestered life of a Supreme Court justice, in which virtually all public discourse takes place through these cautious and frequently dry decisions, is fairly resistant to the glib anecdotes and social tidbits common to the theatrical genre; Marshall’s fellow justice William O. Douglas was the subject of 1990’s “Mountain,” but then had three divorces and three impeachment attempts to liven up his years on the bench. And so Mr. Stevens packs Marshall’s 24 Supreme Court years into 10 concluding minutes, punctuated largely with a pair of jokes — a fairly mild one about the court’s 1969 deliberations on pornography and a better one about Richard Nixon hovering over Marshall’s sickbed — and a glorified stump speech that encapsulates the man’s core beliefs.

Marshall does, however, find room for a veiled comment about his successor. When asked whether he would prefer to be replaced with another African-American, he stresses the primacy of competence over color. “My dad told me there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake,” he says. “They both bite.” Mr. Fishburne lets a brief pause and a sidelong glance speak volumes here: His best-known film roles — Ike Turner, the “Matrix” guru Morpheus — are hardly known for their senses of humor, but the actor displays a sly, ingratiating wit whenever Mr. Stevens’s script or Leonard Foglia’s streamlined direction permits.

“Thurgood,” which debuted at Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse in 2006 starring James Earl Jones, devotes far more attention to the intrigues behind Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that heralded the end of “separate but equal.” The play is structured as an address by an aging Marshall at his alma mater, Howard University, shortly after his retirement. (This academic setting allows Mr. Stevens to trot out some fairly tired storytelling devices: rhetorical questions as a way of introducing a new chapter; fictitious questions from the audience.) But he was 46 — exactly Mr. Fishburne’s age — when the long-awaited decision was handed down, and “Thurgood” presents everything that follows as the logical, almost inevitable result of Marshall’s poise and ironclad logic.

Marshall attained this rigorousness somewhat atypically: through detention, for being what his teacher called “disputatious.” One of his schoolteachers in Baltimore would banish him to the boiler room with a copy of the Constitution, where he committed it to memory — while hearing instances of police brutality from the station house next door. (Marshall would later become one of the court’s strongest death penalty opponents.) After college, he was told by the dean of the University of Maryland’s law school that black men were not welcome; six years later, he successfully sued the school on behalf of another talented young black man. He ultimately became the first black justice of the Supreme Court — and was sworn in by a former Klansman.

Ideally, these ironies and ambiguities would spawn a more intriguing work of theater than “Thurgood.” Mr. Foglia succumbs to every trapping of tasteful biography, from obvious sound effects to Elaine J. McCarthy’s sepia-toned projections to the applause-triggering punch lines that accompany each legal victory. Marshall touts his own tenacity and single-mindedness long after these characteristics have been established, and while he grumbles about rumors of booze and women, the script lets him off the hook on both counts without ever exploring either issue.

Luckily, Mr. Fishburne is able to supply some of the missing complexities. He holds back the full depths of his velvety baritone at first, letting the unseasoned young lawyer grow into his own voice as his confidence grows. The actor’s massive hands are constantly at work, whether curling around his thick eyeglasses or pointing reprovingly at an imagined enemy, to the point where jurisprudence becomes an almost artisanal process. There’s a sensual intensity to the way he applies his girth, his intelligence, and his piercing moral clarity to push the law in the right direction.

“The law is a weapon if you know how to use it,” he says more than once, one of several instances in which Mr. Stevens skillfully establishes a thought or idea that later takes on deeper significance. And Marshall was a superb marksman, patiently locating and attacking the weak links of a monstrous but seemingly unbreakable system. Messrs. Stevens and Fishburne present an unsurprising but nonetheless bracing image: that of the robe-clad judge as war hero.

Until July 20 (222 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).