The set for A Lesson Before Dying consists of a wooden frame with some effective detailing and holes where the walls should be. Romulus Linney’s stage adaptation of Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning novel is a little like that, but the frame is so powerful that the holes don’t matter. And in this co-production of the Orpheum Foxborough and New Repertory Theatre, the play, which is in its New England premiere, is rendered with such a steady, eloquent sincerity that, whatever one’s reservations about the flattening of the Oprah-endorsed novel, it is a very moving experience.

Gaines, who is best known for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, situates most of his fiction in the rural Louisiana of his childhood. Set in 1948, A Lesson Before Dying centers on a young black man who’s guilty of having been " at the wrong place at the wrong time " when his two disreputable companions and a white liquor-store owner shot one another dead. The only person left standing, he is dealt the death penalty by a white jury. In a desperate effort to get him off, his court-appointed lawyer paints him as a dumb animal, saying, " I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this. " The result is not, of course, that the defendant, Jefferson, is acquitted but that he bitterly takes to proclaiming his hoghood. Distraught and desperate that he die " like a man, " his godmother, Miss Emma, enlists the African-American schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, to impart whatever lesson will help the young man face his fate with dignity. At the same time, Grant, who has lost his faith, is pitted against the Reverend Ambrose, who is bent on making sure Jefferson gets to heaven, whether on two feet or all fours.

Obie-award winning playwright Linney has eliminated some characters and sacrificed the particular Cajun feel of the locale, where blacks are not just degraded by whites but subject to a caste system in which light-skinned Creoles consider themselves superior to dark-skinned African-Americans. Moreover, the animosity between the uneducated minister and the teacher seems insufficiently rooted and resolved. But Linney sticks closely to the spine of the story, lightening up Gaines’s presentation of Jefferson as a Christ figure.

Here the young man is brought to a sense of self-worth by the teacher, who is undergoing a crisis of his own with regard to escaping the Jim Crow South, and by the meager yet touching attentions of the black community, whose members range from stoic oldsters like Jefferson’s godmother, who sends baskets of fried chicken, to the " chirren " of the plantation school, who send Jefferson pecans and pray for him when the horrible moment arrives. Grant even finds a way to supply the condemned man, who finds heroism in a very odd corner, with comfort in the form of a $10 radio the Reverend Ambrose refers to as a " sin box " and a voice in the form of a notebook and pencil.

Lois Roach’s simple, searing staging — and the storeroom of the Parish Courthouse where most of the meetings with the shackled prisoner take place — is overseen by large, carved African figures. Similarly, some African sound is mixed into the blues-dominated musical underlay. There is also a suggestion of Grant’s broken-down schoolroom, to one side, and a tiny tile-floored bit of barroom where Grant wrestles his personal demons under the sympathetic but unclouded eye of his girlfriend and fellow teacher, Vivian Baptiste.

Among the fine cast, New York actor Malcolm Foster Smith is a fiery, imposing Grant, ably walking the thin line between exposing and containing his contempt for Ed Peed’s white-cracker sheriff. The wonderful Barbara Meek conveys Miss Emma’s gritty determination and bone-weariness. Jacqui Parker, another reliable, brings both silkiness and strength to Vivian, whose visit to Jefferson puts the poor boy in awe. ( " She’s the first lady that pretty that ever touched me, " he says with heartbreaking honesty.) As the mad-as-hellfire Reverend Ambrose, Michael Green is a bit relentless — but so, perhaps, is the character.

As Jefferson, Brandeis graduate acting student Malik B. El-Amin, though he doesn’t register much awareness of his chains, grows from a baby-faced, sullen fury to a strength that surprises him as much as it does anybody. Another Brandeis graduate actor, Timothy Carter, plays the dutiful deputy sheriff, moving subtly from his spear-carrier role in a drama of injustice to the more important one of bearing painful, admiring witness. As these actors make clear, there is more than one learner in A Lesson Before Dying.