NEW YORK, NY.- Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a preperformance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.

As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”

A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.

Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.

Dustin Wills’ production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)

The second character (Claudia Logan) soon emerges from the audience to join the Director, explaining that she is participating, just as she was asked to.

“People say to me all the time: ‘Girl, you are a character,’” she tells him, and she is — a stock character named Sassy.

The four other characters are deliberate cliches, too: a cleaner (Seret Scott, quietly virtuosic) who juggles multiple jobs; a man (Will Cobbs) in a police uniform, who is Sassy’s ex; a sweet young guy (CG) who lapses into masculine posturing; and Road (Seven F. B. Duncombe), a self-emancipated former slave.

“Is this a place of freedom?” Road asks, upon arriving at Lincoln Center from the 19th century, and the silence with which the other characters greet the question suggests that the answer is uncertain at best.

Unlike the characters who storm a theater in Pirandello’s play, Howze’s characters don’t demand to tell a particular story; some need to be cajoled into taking part. But they do strain against their limiting identities — even if that strain is belied throughout by warmly watchable actors so skilled that they routinely turn two dimensions into three.

Howze, whose overloaded “Frontières Sans Frontières” (2017) was also directed by Wills, displays a similar intellectual and political voracity in “Six Characters.” Here he wants to critique white supremacy in American theater and culture while drawing a parallel between the Fascism of Benito Mussolini (his government funded Pirandello’s theater company) and the current threat to American democracy.

It proves unwieldy, making me wish Howze had found a way to clarify and distill the muchness to enhance its potency.

One conceit, though, has a striking visceral power. When the characters start trying to make a new piece of theater — before the Director transmogrifies into Mussolini giving his speech about invading Ethiopia, and “Six Characters” goes somewhat off the rails — they build unambiguously on history, dipping into a box of old costumes and props from past productions at Lincoln Center Theater.

As for the prospect of audience participation (spoiler dead ahead), there isn’t any. But posing the question implies a further question: What structures are we — wittingly or unwittingly, actively or unresistingly — participants in?

At the heart of “Six Characters” is justified anger at racist systems and the rules they impose. In the play, the Director is told: “Your work is not accessible if it’s utterly, simply… quietly… Black. Your work must be loud and funny. Your work is not accessible if it doesn’t include a white proxy, a white voice, a white point of view on the events, a narrative arc that explains itself neatly.”

The American theater, with its tilted playing field, has often required all those things of Black artists. Howze holds a mirror up to its nature, insisting that it stop.

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‘Six Characters’ Through Aug. 25 at Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.