But it’s also a production, long in development, that’s arrived just at the moment we need it. Adapted and directed by Claire Beckman for the Brooklyn-based Brave New World Repertory Theater, “The Plantation” is an examination of race and the legacy of slavery that feels urgently relevant in the wake of the violence last month in Charlottesville, Va.

Set in 1870, in the aftermath of emancipation, it’s a play whose notions of tradition and inheritance and ownership — of property rights that included the rights to human bodies — have far deeper reverberations than they usually do in “The Cherry Orchard.” Black or white, the characters here are our forebears. We can see the resemblance, passed down through generations of the American family, and it isn’t always flattering.

Chekhov’s freed serfs have been transformed into freed slaves, like Furs (Arthur French), who stayed where he was when emancipation came. Devoted to Lillian (Alice Barrett Mitchell), a spoiled creature who is devoted foremost to herself, he prefers the old ways, and so does she — with a stubbornness that may kill them both. She has a houseful of servants she can no longer afford to feed, and a plantation headed for the auction block, yet she clings to the tattered romance of her poisonous, prosperous past.

Her neighbor Alan Lopa (a moving Craig A. Grant), who has a head for business and the money to prove it, suggests a way she could save the plantation: cut down the magnolia trees, build some vacation cottages on the land. But he is a black man, the son of a slave. Even if it means losing the place she loves most in the world, she is not about to listen to him.