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Thurgood Marshall was born the same year Jack Johnson became heavyweight champion of the world. As a new solo play about the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court makes clear, the two men didn’t just break the highest color barrier in their respective fields; they also shared a ferocious aptitude for combat. George Stevens Jr.’s Thurgood imagines the elderly judge regaling a crowd at Howard University with stories from his long and celebrated career. Motivated by a mentor who early on taught him “The law is a weapon,” Marshall fights battle after battle for the sake of black people’s civil rights and, as he puts it, “the white man’s soul.”

Lord knows the world doesn’t need any more biographical solo plays, but if they’re going to be written, they might as well cover something as consequential as Marshall’s winning argument against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. And if they’re going to be performed, you can’t do much better than Laurence Fishburne. Whether he’s playing the serene old Marshall leaning on a cane, the vibrant young Marshall who narrowly escaped lynching in the South, or the various friends and antagonists that Marshall encountered over the years, Fishburne manages the marvelous feat of conveying immense authority with grace. His sly smile and expressive eyes remind you that beyond the courtroom victories and the stubborn streak, Marshall could still charm the ladies.

Stevens and director Leonard Foglia dodge many of the worst excesses of the solo play. All the same, an actor with such easy command of the stage deserves better than this pedestrian writing. Both of the play’s really lyrical passages are outsourced: The Langston Hughes poem that Fishburne recites at the finale, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, which he makes sound like Shakespeare. Elsewhere, riffs on Marshall’s support for gun control and his opposition to the death penalty come off as self-congratulatory applause lines. The only good reason to keep them in the script is the nightly chance to see what Fishburne might unleash on anybody foolish or crazy enough to boo. — Jeremy McCarter

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• Laurence Fishburne Lets ‘Thurgood’ Speak for Itself (4/21/08)