The season opener at ACT's Geary Theater is an angry play, and an urban play, and it's also an entirely sophisticated, provoking, and redemptive profile of one angry, aging, urban black man. The play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Between Riverside and Crazy, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year and with good reason — it's a tightly woven and moving story about an unforgettable, imperfect character who finds redemption in an unexpected and un-clichéd way, despite a world that seems designed to forget about him.

Guirgis's other work, like his 2011 Tony-nominated play The Motherfucker With the Hat, is built on naturalistic and even poetic uses of profanity, and a fountain of anger that runs deep. Actor Carl Lumbly is radiant and cutting as the amiable alcoholic center of the piece, Walter "Pops" Washington, who is recently widowed and has opened up his home to his n'er'-do-well son Junior (Samuel Ray Gates), his less than bright but affectionate girlfriend Lulu (Elia Monte-Brown), and a newly sober parolee who treats him like a father, Oswaldo (Lakin Valdez). They form a temporary family of sorts in the wake of Walter's wife's death, and mostly Pops doesn't leave the large rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive that he's lived in for decades. And he spends his mornings, noons, and nights drinking whiskey and being cantankerous.

The central conflict of the play doesn't involve the roommates, as it turns out, but involves a settlement from the New York Police Department, from which he's now retired. The case goes back eight years, to a night when Walter, off duty and drinking in a shady after-hours club, was shot six times by a white rookie cop. Walter survived, but the shooting left him disabled and full of rage about the injustice of it, and the compensation he feels he's due. He's kept a law firm on retainer ever since, and refuses to settle with the city for the unnamed large sum he was initially offered. Enter his former partner, a female onetime rookie named Audrey (played by the wonderful Stacy Ross) and her fiancé, Dave, an ambitious lieutenant seeking to curry favor with the department by finally getting Walter to settle his case.

What plays out is an at times gut-wrenching, and often very darkly funny war of wills between characters whose motivations, justifications, and sympathies are all sharply and perfectly defined, and no one gets out of this clean, or looking very good, including Walter. His weaknesses and liabilities are at the dark heart of the play, and Guirgis is masterful at allowing us to see all of his flaws, cringe at them, and yet forgive him and root for him nonetheless. His story is also the complicated story of a life as a big-city cop, and as he says in the play, when you're a cop long enough you become what you see every day.

The character who creates the play's hilarious and ultimately redemptive pivot point is known only as Church Lady, and actress Catherine Castellanos does a terrific job bringing her to life.

The production is directed by the talented Irene Lewis, who was last at ACT directing Dead Metaphor, which bears some similarity to this play in its anger and struggling central character. The extraordinary set, which looks like a dusty, true-to-life "classic six" on New York's Upper West Side, was designed by Christopher Barreca, and makes some terrific, dynamic shifts in perspective despite being a primarily static interior.

All told this is a play that transcends the gritty humanness of its parts, and it shouldn't be dismissed a play about race, or about poor, urban characters and their woes. It is a play about the specific salvation of one un-extraordinary man told with extraordinary precision and wit, and it's a must-see.

Between Riverside and Crazy plays through September 27. Get tickets here.