Clybourne Park Through September 27; Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.; $21-$24. Las Vegas Little Theatre, 702-362-7996.

Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer-winning play Clybourne Park is an inversion of and response to Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun. In that play, while a black family plans to buy a cheap house in an all-white neighborhood, a representative from that neighborhood, Karl, offers them a lot of money not to. In Act 1 of Clybourne Park (set in 1959), Norris imagines why the family selling would leave such a neighborhood, and has the Karl character plead with the white family not to sell.

Act 2 revisits the same house 50 years later, after the neighborhood has been through the white flight and urban decay of intervening decades, now subject to gentrification. A wealthy young white couple wishes to buy the property so they can raze the house and build a new custom mansion completely out of character with the neighborhood. The same actors play new characters, all somehow connected to those in the first act, adding an emotional echo. It’s a fierce, funny and gut-wrenching play, and under Lysander Abadia’s direction at Las Vegas Little Theatre, it comes to crackling life.

Jacob Moore as Karl in the first act and Steve in the second is electric to watch—his characters are the most overt about racism in both acts, and because of this they live in that way great villains truly can—embracing the awful while struggling, mostly unsuccessfully, with niceties. Adriane McLean as Francine/Lena (the household help in the first act, a neighborhood leader concerned about the house in the second) also is sharp, staying on high alert in the first act, protecting her dignity while not landing afoul of unconsciously racist (and sexist) attitudes. In the second act her efforts to stand up for her community have a different tone—especially since her character is not as obviously contained by class and custom—but she remains emotionally astute.

Emotional specificity is brought to all of the characters, making them much more alive than simply a tract on racial tensions. But on a micro level, I think some of the smaller moments could have used a little more creativity and attentiveness. There were times when the blocking didn’t support the action of the play, and yelling louder seemed to be the default setting for indicating heightened emotion.

I wanted more technically from the set as well. Ron Lindblom’s work felt a little perfunctory. The house didn’t feel haunted by a life a family was leaving behind in the first act, and the second act’s destruction felt less like squalor and more like Basquiat thanks to graffiti being framed entirely by the stairs.

But these are minor critiques. Clybourne Park is powerful and lingering, managing to dissect race with humor and bleakness.