The propulsive, menacing ride that is “Dutchman” commences well before the couple at its center begin their treacherous mating dance. Director Bill Duke and set designer Troy Hourie have transformed the Cherry Lane Theatre’s interior and lobby into a rundown subway station, complete with turnstile, rushing video projections (by Aaron Rhyne), and a stern conductor. Everything, in other words, except the third rail — and this sturdy revival of LeRoi Jones’s merciless dissection of racial anger offers plenty of inflammatory energy to power its own way into the 21st century.

That live-wire passion earned Mr. Jones, better known today as Amiri Baraka, his share of plaudits (including an Obie Award), as well as brickbats when “Dutchman” made its premiere at the Cherry Lane in 1964. Replicating its explosive response would be almost impossible 43 years later, and Mr. Duke has made little effort to recalibrate the play’s provocations for a more jaded modern-day audience. Rather, he lets the jostling, occasionally unwieldy text make its own case, relying heavily on committed performances from his two stars, Dulé Hill of “West Wing” fame and Jennifer Mudge. And even when the play shows its age, falling back on facile linguistic trickery, Mr. Duke and his nimble cast never lose sight of the unquenchable vitriol coursing just under the surface.

Set on a subway car “smashing along through the city’s entrails,” “Dutchman” is an hour-long pas de deux between Clay (Mr. Hill), a bourgeois black man, and Lula (Ms. Mudge), a white woman who alternates between seducing and condescending to what she describes as her “tender big-eyed prey.” Each taps into potent racial resentments, and the sexual banter inevitably morphs into something far uglier.

The play made its premiere the same year that Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for “Lilies of the Field,” and Mr. Poitier’s buttoned-up, unassailably presentable representation of blackness comes under direct scrutiny. Mr. Jones suggests that maintaining this inoffensive exterior requires the suppression of deep reservoirs of rage, and “Dutchman” depicts the gradual shedding of Clay’s placid veneer. (This sense of pent-up outrage also fueled James Baldwin’s “Blues for Mister Charlie,” which opened a month after the original “Dutchman.”)

In many ways, Clay stands alone: As the subway car gradually fills with other riders, the white passengers tend to be crisply dressed, while the black men are unkempt, drunk, dissolute. Clay is the lone exemplar of a “respectable” African-American until the final seconds of the play, and the pressure to separate from his people proves intolerable.

(An odd semi-exception to this racial breakdown comes from the train conductor, played by Paul Benjamin. He stands in the center of the lobby with unassailable authority before “Dutchman” begins, but this initial command quickly fades. Mr. Duke punctuates the play’s scene changes by having Mr. Benjamin perform an ominously servile and distancing shuffle across the stage, a rare misstep in Mr. Duke’s staging.)

Lula immediately views Clay’s respectability as a challenge. Wrapping her arms and legs around the subway pole seductively and punctuating each incitement with a smug grin, she assumes emotional control with such confidence that it takes several minutes before she realizes the power has shifted away from her. Here and elsewhere, Ms. Mudge powerfully captures Lula’s blend of worldliness and naïveté. In response to Lula’s exhibitionistic display, Clay’s responses are terse, guarded, almost like Shakespearean asides in their self-evaluating complexity. Mr. Hill is at his best during these charged moments, and while the chemistry between the two takes a while to gel, both he and Ms. Mudge rise to the challenges of Mr. Jones’s volatile, frequently shifting power dynamics.

Few things date themselves faster than the vernacular of racial self-expression, and the language of “Dutchman” often finds itself mired in the mid-1960s, as when Clay lashes out at the “ofays” around him. But the pulsing fury of his climactic final monologue (nicely performed by Mr. Hill) remains indelible, as he describes the sublimated rage of black musicians like Charlie “Bird” Parker and Bessie Smith: “Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. … Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished.”

Yet after almost 50 years, Mr. Baraka’s enduring voice demonstrates that articulated anger and creative ferment need not be mutually exclusive. (Coherence is not a given, however, as evidenced by the mindless insinuations about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that cost him his position as New Jersey’s poet laureate.) Such anger hailed a bracing new direction in American theater, and it would be deeply comforting to speak of the issues raised by “Dutchman” solely in the past tense. It would also be inaccurate.

Until February 10 (38 Commerce St., at Bedford Street, 212-239-6200).