Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe’s bread-and-butter productions are often musicals, playing to its actors’ song-and dance talents. But occasionally WBTT offers a straight drama that allows its cast members to explore other sides of themselves and us. That’s the case with its current production, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work A Soldier’s Play, by Charles Fuller.

A Soldier’s Play first bowed in the 1980s, and WBTT presented an earlier production here some 15 years ago. (It was also filmed in the ’80s, as A Soldier’s Story.) So it’s been a while since we’ve visited the characters, and the landscape, of its exploration of the deep and twisted roots of discrimination.

Those characters are all Army men, mostly Black, based in segregated Louisiana in 1944 as World War II rages on. The Black soldiers, however, are not allowed to serve in combat, rather being confined to less heroic duties at Fort Neal, and certainly not welcomed by the locals.

That setup already provides some tension, but Fuller’s play revs into high gear with the murder of a Black sergeant named Waters (Patric Robinson). At first, the crime is assumed to be at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, and the base’s white Captain Taylor (Eric Van Baars) is unhappy with the assignment of a Black JAG officer, Captain Davenport (Michael Mejia-Mendez), to investigate, fearing that the white population will never allow a Black man to successfully bring the murderer to trial.

Davenport perseveres, interviewing the men of Waters’ platoon and gradually unraveling the truth, as Black soldiers Peterson (Darius Autry), Cobb (Brian L. Boyd), Smalls (Peterly Jean Baptiste), Wilkie (Terry Spann) and Henson (Jerald Wheat) provide sometimes puzzling testimony. Was Waters liked and respected, as his demoted dogsbody Wilkie initially says? Was he tough but fair, or was he, rather, something of a sadist, dedicated to hounding one private, Memphis (Leon Pitts II), out of the Army or worse? And, if the latter, why?

What might seem at first a simple if awful case of prejudice becomes a more complicated matter of hate even within the ranks of the Black soldiers themselves. And while we are left at the end with the hope that things are going to change, you may wonder how much they indeed really have.

Under the direction of Chuck Smith (with the assistance of Jacob Smith, a Marine Corps veteran as military advisor), the cast members convincingly portray soldiers with a mix of discipline, swaggering, profanity and occasional camaraderie. Our attention switches back and forth between various actors as the play unspools, but Robinson often dominates as Waters, whose in-your-face portrayal may at first feel overdone but gradually comes to seem true to what a Black man who already served in the first world war and has dealt all his life with being second class might be like.

Autry (who appeared previously at WBTT in a one-man show about Muhammad Ali) has a strong presence as Peterson. Mejia-Mendez makes his Davenport clearly cut from a different cloth than what everyone else in the drama is expecting. And Pitts has some effective moments as Memphis, a happy-natured Southerner who later suffers greatly at the hands of Waters.

Overall, A Soldier’s Play is hard-hitting and compelling. It continues through Feb. 18; for tickets, call (941) 366-1505 or go to westcoastblacktheatre.org.