In 1965, not long after the assassination of Malcolm X, a major championship prizefight is about to take place at a shabby arena in Lewiston, Maine. It is the infamous rematch between former heavyweight champ Sonny Liston and current champ Cassius Clay, who’s just recently announced he’s changing his name to Muhammad Ali. The fight is being held in such an out of way location because of Ali’s connection to the Black Muslim movement, and with Malcolm X’s death rumored to have been at the hands of the Black Muslim’s, every other sports venue turned the fight down for fear of being caught in a shootout.

As if things aren’t tense enough in the locker room, Ali has just reached out for some advice from an unexpected source, summoning to the locker room the disgraced African-American actor Lincoln Perry, best known as the controversial Hollywood movie character Stepin Fetchit, aka “The Laziest Man in the World.”

The real-life friendship between Ali and Perry is the subject of hip-hop playwright Will Power’s electrifying and entertaining play "Fetch Clay, Make Man," now playing at Marin Theater Company in Mill Valley.

Like Ali in the ring, Power’s energetic script throws punches in every direction, ducking a few story-problems here and there by tossing off fast-paced banter and lyrically outrageous dialogue, including a fair number of Ali’s famous hyperbolic rhyming antagonisms.

As Ali, stage actor Eddie Ray Jackson effectively conveys the youthful physicality and playfully preening attitude, while television actor Roscoe Orman plays Fetchit/Perry with a compelling combination of watchful self-protection and wily grace. Orman, best known for forty years of playing Gordon on ‘Sesame Street,’ has made a side-career of playing Lincoln Perry, having toured the globe with the eye-opening one-man-show "The Confessions of Stepin Fetchit."

The main attraction in the Mill Valley production of "Fetch Clay, Make Man" is the expert chemistry between Orman and Jackson. As scripted by Power, we never know what’s going to happen next, and as these two iconic characters trade verbal punches - and find a powerfully moving common ground - the electricity extends to the rest of the play’s vibrant cast of characters, including Ali’s canny wife Sonji, his Nation of Islam handler Brother Rashid, and - in a series of telling flashbacks to the Golden Age of Hollywood - the cagey studio executive William Fox.

The script, while always compelling, is not perfect, making a number of breathtaking leaps that are a less than believable, as when Sonji transforms from a demure, veiled possession into a sexy woman of the sixties, in little more than a few minutes. But this is theater, and Power has a lot of ground to explore in a short period, so if the script tries a few too many tricks of time to squeeze it all in, at least the playwright has given us plenty of verbal razzle dazzle and truly fascinating conflicts to distract us.

In "Fetch Clay, Make Man," directed with style and humor by Derrick Sanders, there is as much going on below the surface as above it, and as a depiction of a tumultuous time in American history, this philosophical meeting-of-two-historic-minds is, faults aside, a stirring, emotionally satisfying knockout.

"Fetch Clay, Make Man" runs through September 7 at Marin Theatre Company, marintheatre.org.