When Charles Fuller’s drama “A Soldier’s Play” had its world premiere Off Broadway in 1981, the playwright envisioned an audience — and a public — that was ready to face uncomfortable truths about the enduring, unwieldy legacy of white supremacy in America. It had been nearly two decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Mr. Fuller had grown weary of what he called “the simple racial conflict,” in which white characters and black ones are neatly arrayed on opposite sides of a battlefield.

He wanted to go deeper.

“We are beginning to turn away from focusing on our problems with whites, to matters involving blacks as human beings,” he said in an interview in 1982 in The New York Times about the play, which explored self-loathing and racial tension among black soldiers in a predominantly white American military.

By a quirk of history, Mr. Fuller’s play is now being revived in New York during a season when “simple racial conflict” is once again a first-order concern. From the turmoil in Charlottesville, Va., to President Trump’s criticism of football players’ — many of them black — kneeling during the national anthem, primordial wounds caused by racial divisions are festering anew. As a result, the play — which was celebrated for its nuanced dissection of race, dignity and identity — may actually seem ahead of the times.

In interviews, actors from the 1981 production — including Denzel Washington — and several in the current revival said they hope audiences sense the echoes between past and present.