Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” has been parsed, plumbed, and pondered so thoroughly — it’s probably on more college syllabi than any play written in the 30 years between “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Angels in America” — that it sort of hides in plain sight. Its opening act alone, a surreal dinner party made up of centuries’ worth of famous women, might as well be known as the Scene That Launched a Thousand Theses.

Well, put down your crib sheets and forget all that background (although you may want to take a peek at the Breughel painting that features Ms. Churchill’s least communicative dinner guest, the hell-invading Dull Gret, for the sheer fun of it). James Macdonald’s razor-sharp, impeccably acted production basks in the play’s frequently cloaked but constantly beating heart without sacrificing an ounce of the intellectual gravitas that made it such a powerhouse in 1982. Sometimes greatness can obscure just how good something is — and “Top Girls,” we are bracingly reminded, is a very, very good play.

Yes, the dinner party hums with a chaotic — and often confounding — brio as women both imagined and real gather in honor of Marlene (Elizabeth Marvel), a newly promoted executive in Thatcherite England. In addition to the monosyllabic Gret (Ana Reeder), there’s the sickly but intrepid Victorian explorer Isabella Bird (Marisa Tomei); the possibly apocryphal Pope Joan (Martha Plimpton), who kept her gender a secret until giving birth during a parade; Lady Nijo (Jennifer Ikeda), a 13th-century Japanese courtesan who became a traveling Buddhist nun, and the much-abused Patient Griselda (Mary Catherine Garrison), whose sad story Chaucer recounted in “The Canterbury Tales.” Amid the halfhearted sympathies and constant interruptions — Ms. Churchill maps out these overlaps with excruciating precision, and Mr. Macdonald and his performers navigate them beautifully — a through line of sublimation and (frequently punished) assertiveness emerges.

After that opening sequence, however, Ms. Churchill’s narrative shifts away from dazzle and into a far more realistic story of women striving ambivalently for status and affirmation. (Laura Bauer’s 1980s outfits are as enjoyably cringeworthy as her dinner-party costumes are enchanting.) The rest of the play toggles between the Top Girls employment agency in London, where Marlene has just been named managing director, and the dingy East Anglian home she fled as a teenager. (Tom Pye’s sets delineate each of these spaces with an eye-catching blend of grimy props and diaphanous white fabric.) The agency is filled with go-getter types who view their clients with a blend of solicitude and contempt; Marlene’s resentful sister Joyce (Ms. Tomei), meanwhile, is stuck raising an unprepossessing 16-year-old named Angie (Ms. Plimpton), who dreams of moving to London to be with her beloved aunt.

Marlene is clearly the play’s central figure, but she is also the least prominent member of the opening sextet. History practically crowds her off the stage, as Ms. Churchill spurns the typical Aristotelian model of establishing a protagonist. Despite her protestations of self-reliance, Marlene cannot exist outside of the society that has formed her: her forebears, in addition to a series of cultural touchstones created by men (Breughel and the three men — Boccaccio and Petrarch, in addition to Chaucer — who immortalized Griselda).

And this is not an affirming, consciousness-raising circle. Several of the guests may admit to and even boast of their submission to men, but there is very little deference on display here. Ms. Churchill’s characters constantly interrupt and ignore one another, asking a question and then barging right in to answer it themselves. This same one-upmanship exists in the modern scenes: A pitch-perfect scene between one interviewer (Ms. Ikeda) and a 40-something applicant (the splendid Mary Beth Hurt, who also plays a silent waitress in Act 1) serves as an almost unbearably sad microcosm of the dinner party, with its failed intergenerational connections and something very close to what Isabella Bird calls “indefinable terror.”

The disparity in ambition between hyperaggressive Marlene and stay-at-home Joyce has a slightly stage-managed feel, and while some of the Top Girls applicants fall somewhere in between, Ms. Churchill assumes a somewhat reductive posture regarding the feasibility of achieving a happy medium. She also shows her hand a bit too starkly in the final scene, in which Marlene loudly proclaims her affinity with the top Top Girl of the moment, Margaret Thatcher. (She even proclaims, “I don’t believe in class,” which in 1980s England was a bit like announcing skepticism about gravity.)

But these qualms don’t surface until well after the curtain has gone down, owing to extraordinarily thought-out performances by Ms. Marvel and an almost unrecognizable Ms. Tomei. (Listen to Marlene slip back into her Suffolk accent as the scene progresses, accelerated by drink and exhaustion.) Coupled with Ms. Plimpton’s gorgeous rendition of a teenager destined for the slag heap, the three convey both the resentments and the deep-seated empathy of a sundered family.

As strong as this trio is, the performances throughout are beyond reproach. The job interviews offer piercing glimpses of a society in uneasy flux, and all seven performers execute the devilishly complicated dinner with discipline and gusto. (Ms. Reeder’s gloriously inappropriate table manners are a highlight, and Ms. Garrison’s poignant Griselda is the first of her four terrific supporting roles.) That meal is why so many people remember “Top Girls.” The spurned connections and terrible decisions that follow are why so many more cherish it.

Until June 29 (247 W. 47th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).