Nearly three decades after it was first unveiled, the panoramic view provided by Anna Deavere Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror” still makes you catch your breath and shake your head in sorrow. In the Signature Theater’s crystalline revival of this documentary drama about the Crown Heights race riots of 1991, its reflective surfaces seem, if anything, more acutely focused, its patterns both sharper and more damning.

“Healing,” as it refers to a possible reconciliation between races at combustible odds, is a word that’s pronounced with skepticism in this production, which opened on Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. As you meet different representatives of the black and Hasidic communities that clashed so destructively during one violent August in Brooklyn, the chasm that separates them gapes wider than ever.

Yet no one who attends this production is likely to leave clogged with despair, even as you’re aware of how deeply divided this nation remains. As performed by the remarkable young actor Michael Benjamin Washington, embodying more than two dozen different characters, and directed by Saheem Ali, “Fires in the Mirror” energizes with its sheer force of clarity. It’s one of the consolations of first-rate art that there is somehow always hope in being able to see with newly unobstructed eyes.

“Fires” is indeed confirmed here as an enduring work of theatrical art, far more than an ingeniously configured piece of investigative journalism. When it first opened at the Public Theater in 1992, a little more than a year after the events that inspired it, critics and theatergoers scrambled for a label to define a type of show few of them had ever seen before.