A monument to the Confederacy enrages a group of young people. Late one night, they topple the statue. Trouble ensues.

Scenes like that are now playing over and over on the nightly news. But two decades ago, the rebellious destruction sprang from the imagination of the playwright Tony Kushner, who presciently placed a Confederate statue-toppling in his powerful musical “Caroline, or Change,” which ran briefly on Broadway in 2004 and has been widely performed since.

To revisit the show’s story and lyrics is to gain another vantage point on the longstanding frustrations and impatience fueling much of today’s agitation and activism over the removal of statues, flags and street and building names that honor the Confederacy. In “Caroline, or Change,” which Mr. Kushner first drafted in 1997 and which is set in 1963, an African-American high school student named Emmie Thibodeaux — impatient with the pace of civil rights and chafing at what she sees as a local tribute to segregation — joins a group of friends in destroying a monument to Confederate soldiers in Lake Charles, La.

As they topple the statue, its head falls off; the body is later found in a nearby bayou, but the head is missing.