This column is about how the star of my favorite network-television comedy wrote a play about Dallas — and race, politics, religion and the 1960s — that is loosely based on a book penned by an old friend.

You cannot see the play, yet, unless you are in New York City. And you cannot read the book, unless you are willing to sit with it in the downtown library, because it's out of print and sells for upward of $880.

But if you live in Dallas, you might already know this story — should, anyway. Though this play may be set in the past, its narrative profoundly informs this city's present. Its future, too.

The play tells how Dallas City Hall and the State Fair of Texas joined forces in the late 1960s to snatch the land beneath hundreds of South Dallas homeowners — a wound still tender. The official line was that it was for parking. Bad enough. But the real truth resides in the pages of a 1966 report, which said that to improve the fairgrounds, the city must first disappear those "poor Negroes in shacks" that were too close to Fair Park.

My dad's business was on Second Avenue then; he saw friends and customers chased off by the bulldozers. He and others who lived through that repeatedly tell the sordid tale, especially in recent years, as the city wrestles with turning over Fair Park to a private operator — a vote due Wednesday, in fact. Yesterday's cruelty informs tomorrow's decision.

The play is called Travisville and was written by William Jackson Harper, a son of Oak Cliff who plays tortured philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye on NBC's The Good Place. Harper's play was inspired by Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze's 1986 book The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City, which explained that the civil-rights movement skipped Dallas because powerful whites gave blacks just enough to make it seem like were better off when they weren't.

Dallas isn't mentioned in the play, which has been well-received by The New York Times and The Daily Beast. Neither is the State Fair or City Hall. Travisville, a mixed-use development, is the stand-in. But I spoke with the 38-year-old Harper, and he made it crystal-clear: Travisville is a thinly veiled retelling of how the Rev. Peter Johnson, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came to Dallas in 1969 and took on the black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, which refused to fight for their brothers and sisters in Fair Park.

William Jackson Harper, who plays Chidi on The Good Place, has written his first play — about his hometown of Dallas. (Akos Stiller / The New York Times)

"It's more than just active repression by a white power structure," Harper said in an interview this week. "There was also this very conservative black clergy in collusion with these white civic leaders to keep things pleasant and safe and keep Dallas out of those headlines."

Harper said he once asked asked his mother, born and raised near Alta Mesa Park in far southern Dallas, whether the civil-rights movement had ever come to Dallas. He thought of the sit-ins and marches and the vicious displays of police brutality he'd seen in the documentary Eyes on the Prize. Surely, some of that had come to Dallas.

She could only recall the October 1960 protest in front of H.L. Green Co. downtown, led by the Revs. E.W. Thomas and H. Rhett James.

"She said, 'That's about it,'" Harper recalled. "And I was like, 'Huh, OK.' That's always been in the back of my mind. I wondered why nothing happened in Dallas. And then I read The Accommodation."

In the early 2000s, Harper worked at the Half Price Books mothership on Northwest Highway, where he scored a copy of Schutze's book. It was a revelation that led, eventually, to Harper's own interpretation, in which the names have been changed, timelines have been tweaked but the truth remains timeless and inescapable.

"There's an issue of resentment most of America hasn't dealt with, and it's still really apparent in Dallas," Harper said. "I can feel it when I am around my family. The things that come out of people's mouths is from a place of deep hurt and anger they don't express when they're out in the world. Everything made more sense when I read this."

I have only read the play, but I hope it will come here. We keep talking about how we need to have this hard talk about race. But we don't. Because we can't. So here you go — Dallas' sordid history presented as art, which this refined city loves to gobble up in fancified confines.

Journalist Julia Barton, one of a dozen people who told me about Travisville, says it's a potent piece — "like I was hearing and seeing the interior side of the black voices in Schutze's book," she wrote via email after seeing it. "It just felt like a piece of art that's been needed for a long time."

Bjorn DuPaty (left) and Brian D. Coats in Travisville, loosely based on Jim Schutze's The Accommodation:The Politics of Race in an American City. (Jeremy Daniel)

A good review. But I only trust one person to tell me if it's any good.

That's Peter Johnson, maybe the only recognizable figure in Travisville, though his name in the play is changed to Ezekel Phillips. In fact and in fiction, he was the outsider who came to town and got slapped back by the handshake agreement made by blacks and whites. Johnson says it in the book, Zeke in the play: "I still feel as though I have stepped back in time."

1 / 2In 1971, the Rev. Peter Johnson sat on the steps of the old City Hall during his fast, intended to highlight the number of starving people in this city.(Joe Laird / The Dallas Morning News) 2 / 2

I sent Johnson the script and asked for his thoughts. He said he "loved it," and it brought back "memories of some of those crazy meetings with those ministers."

The play is timeless, too, he said — 50 years later, the same fight in the same place. An endless, exhausting loop.

"The discussion about race in this part of the country has never taken place, never seriously," Johnson said. "We have never discussed how yesterday affects the reality of today in terms of the relationship between the black and white communities."

He sighed.

"It is what it is."