NEW YORK - During an early performance of "Purlie Victorious," a raucously subversive comedy set in the Jim Crow South, something felt off to its star, Leslie Odom Jr. Then it hit him: It was the insufficient venom he was bringing to his scenes with Jay O. Sanders, who plays the show's villain, a virulent white supremacist.

So Odom pulled Sanders aside and said to him, "'I'm not hating you the way that I should,'" Odom recalled. "I didn't want to hurt Jay's feelings. I didn't want it to ostracize him or make him feel like I was mad at him. And so we shook hands, and we agreed that we would go all the way."

"All the way" meant pulling out all the vituperative stops, which is exactly what the cast of Ossie Davis's exuberant 1961 satire aims for eight times a week at the Music Box Theatre. The revival is the first on Broadway for "Purlie Victorious," subtitled "A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch."

Odom, a Tony winner for "Hamilton," plays the titular role originated by Davis - that of a sly but idealistic preacher looking to turn the tables on the White ruling class and create a Georgia congregation open to Black and White parishioners alike. As a result, "Purlie" has the magnetic drawing card it needs to try to match the success of the original, which ran for 261 performances and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The revival's producers just announced an extension of its run until Feb. 4.

How frequently the cash registers ring in the coming weeks will be a test of the production's highly entertaining yet provocative ingredients, at a time when some plays with racial themes have struggled at the box office. ("Ain't No Mo'" and "Thoughts of a Colored Man" both closed prematurely last season.) But either way, the show owes a debt to Odom, who for several years had been lobbying for a revival. "Leslie Odom Jr. asked to get the play up," said Kenny Leon, the production's director. "You need a star, for someone like him to lead and walk the walk the way he's walked it."

Producers, led by veteran Jeffrey Richards, had been considering the play, too, but on the page it certainly was not a home-run project in trigger-warning-obsessed 2023. "Purlie Victorious" is scathingly funny, gazing at a mid-century world of racial inequality. (The cast decided the play, described in the program as taking place in "the recent past," is set in the 1950s.) The play is also unbridled in some of the bigoted language and ideas of Sanders's Ol' Cap'n, who behaves like a character out of "Birth of a Nation." Moreover, it takes a nimble director and cast to contextualize Davis's take on Southern Black stereotypes, so a diverse audience understands that the deferential way some of the characters behave in the presence of Ol' Cap'n is not how they see themselves.

"There are some scary doors that must be opened, and hate is one of them," Odom said of the play. "You know, hate disfigures us. Hate is a burden that you have to shoulder each day."

At a Meatpacking District eatery last week, the actor dived into a passionate midmorning conversation about his appetite for the play and the way his life has changed since his performance as Aaron Burr in "Hamilton." The 42-year-old actor - Queens-born, Philadelphia-raised and Carnegie Mellon-trained (in the same class as Josh Gad and Josh Groban) - has two children now, ages 2 and 6. That responsibility tends to mature one fast. Odom says that as a parent he has discovered how to better conserve his energy and strike a finer balance between home life and a burgeoning career.

"The way I make my decisions these days, is: Is that being kind to myself?" Odom said. "You know, I started waking up an hour and a half to two hours before Nicolette [his wife] and the kids just to tend to myself, just to check in with myself before the day starts rushing in. Just to like make my coffee, do my treadmill, journal, read my Bible. So by the time they wake up, I'm [ready] for them."

As happened for other "Hamilton" alumni, the megahit opened major doors. Hollywood came calling, casting him in movies such as "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," the remake of "Murder on the Orient Express" and "One Night in Miami," which earned him an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of soul singer Sam Cooke. He said he's working with Daveed Diggs - the original Thomas Jefferson in "Hamilton" - in Diggs's film adaptation of Percival Everett's 2020 novel, "Telephone."

Broadway, though, was his gateway. Odom started singing in his church choir. At 16, he auditioned for "Rent," soon joining the ensemble as a replacement in the role of Paul, who leads a therapy group for people with AIDS. "That was the first meaningful experience that a lot of us had in the theater," Odom said of the landmark musical. "What it told us was that theater could be these three things at once. It could be artistically fulfilling, it could be culturally relevant, and it could be commercially successful."

He left "Rent" to go to college, realizing he had talent but not the tools. Nearly a decade and a half later, in the mind-blowing vortex of "Hamilton," he sang "The Room Where It Happens" - and helped enter that phrase into the American lexicon. And he learned another lesson, about the cross-fertilization of success and spirituality.

"We were not the big idea. Lin was not the big idea," Odom said, referring to "Hamilton" and its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. "Whether people knew that or not, I knew it. There was something that was happening, an exchange of humanity. They were watching cooperation in action. They were watching love in motion."

Taking on "Purlie Victorious" was a bit of a marketing gamble. The title itself, Odom said, is opaque. "What do those words really evoke?" he said. Richards, the producer, had the idea of asking Davis's estate, overseen by his children, to reinstate the script's subtitle, which had been abandoned. Having "Romp" back in the name pinpoints the production's comic energy.

A musical version starring Cleavon Little and Melba Moore ran on Broadway for 20 months in 1970 and '71. But Odom didn't want to be a singing Purlie. He and Leon, the director, put together readings of Davis's script a couple of years ago. Plays, he said, "are meant to be read aloud, at the very least, to really understand their meaning."

Kara Young plays ingenue Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, originated by Davis's wife, Ruby Dee. "I didn't know the play at all," Young said. "When I read it on the page, I was laughing. I could feel the comedy but I was also, well, 'Whoa.' It feels like a revolutionary play."

To communicate to the audience that "Purlie Victorious" is told in a spirit of fellowship, not rancor, Leon devised a prologue, before the action begins: The nine actors assemble onstage for a cordial, racially mixed meet-and-greet - not as characters in a play but as a gathering of friends. He also made a welcoming recording that's played to explain to audiences that despite its themes, "Purlie Victorious" is a comedy.

"You needed to say something to the crowd, to say that they're allowed to laugh," Leon said.

To Odom, those impulses were inspired by Ossie Davis himself. "We all have our marching orders," he said, "from the script."

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Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, by Ossie Davis. Directed by Kenny Leon. Through Feb. 4 at the Music Box, 239 W. 45th St., New York. purlievictorious.com.