A sanctuary is both a consecrated place and a site of refuge. The church has long served both roles for African Americans, from the time of 18th-century Great Awakening through abolition and the civil rights era. But terms and conditions apply: For queer Christians of any race, the church has too often felt not like a loving home but rather a house of judgment—a barrier to God’s grace rather than its source. As a sensitive Black teen named Ulysses puts it to his pastor in “Saturday Church,” an uplifting new musical now at New York Theatre Workshop, “If I want to be a part of this church, I can’t let a part of me show.”

That, at least, is the message Ulysses is getting from his fellow congregants, especially his disapproving Aunt Rose (Joaquina Kalukango), who won’t let him sing in the choir because he’s too “flouncy.” The paradox for Ulysses, played with tender passion by the vocal powerhouse Bryson Battle, is that, as he says, “I feel completely free when I’m singing in church.”

So Ulysses finds his way to another congregation: the community program of the title, based on the real-life L.G.B.T.Q. ministry of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village, which inspired the 2017 film on which “Saturday Church” is based. Less a formal church service than a gathering place for folks with nowhere else to go, it is run by a trio of shambolic, bickering trans divas—Dijon (Caleb Quezon), Heaven (Anania) and Ebony (B Noel Thomas)—who become mother figures to Ulysses, though his own hard-working mother, Amara (Kristolyn Lloyd), is trying her best. Saturday Church is also the place where Ulysses meets his first crush, a young hustler named Raymond (Jackson Kanawha Perry).

If the script by Damon Cardasis and James Ijames essentially tells a familiar gay coming-out tale, the show fills in that well-worn outline with impish humor, a gallery of memorable characters and—most crucially—a pumping score of house music with gospel touches, courtesy of the Australian pop diva Sia and the American DJ Honey Dijon. Directed with surehanded panache by Whitney White and winningly choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie, “Saturday Church” has the look and feel of a show that could go the distance to Broadway. New York Theatre Workshop, after all, is the place where “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown” were born.

The Shed, a flexible theater space at Hudson Yards, has not yet midwifed any Broadway hits. But it is currently the site of another show in which Black queer spirituality finds expression, albeit far more subtly. “The Brothers Size” is Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2007 play about Louisiana siblings who are each other’s only remaining family. Ogun (André Holland) is a harried auto mechanic, and his free-spirited younger brother Oshoosi (Alani iLongwe) is the one who does most of the harrying. Recently released from prison, Oshoosi spends most of his time regaling Ogun with big talk about his future, most of it involving a car, and hanging out with an old prison buddy, Elegba (Malcolm Mays), who works at a mortuary, and whom Ogun sees as a bad influence on his brother.

This is one of those works of drama in which the outline of the plot—Oshoosi drifts with tragic inevitability back to a wayward path his brother can’t shield him from—doesn’t begin to capture the play’s originality and beauty. This is partly a matter of formal construction: McCraney, who co-directed this production with Bijan Sheibani, imagines the proceedings as a ritual, carried out within a circle of white sand and mimed without props, with intermittent stage directions seamlessly stitched into the spoken dialogue (“Elebga enters, singing a song”). An onstage musician, Munir Zakee, adds texture throughout; Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” has a late-breaking cameo.

These are not mere embellishments or distractions. McCraney has made clear that the play was inspired by a Yoruba tale about two brothers, and he’s given all the characters names and traits from that West African tradition: Ogun is the god of metalwork and labor, Oshoosi the god of the hunt and restlessness, and Elegba a trickster. This mythological undercurrent grounds the play’s action in a wider realm of the collective unconscious, much as the theatrical touches mentioned above strikingly offset the social realism of the dialogue.

It is, in short, a potent, stirring mix, and the actors are all giving performances of richly observed humanity: Holland, whom the weight of worry seems to have pressed down into the stage; iLongwe, who floats above it even when he’s lying down; and Mays, who hovers lightly, an embodied apparition. It is Elegba, in fact, who introduces the show’s only notes of open eroticism. Otherwise the queerness of “The Brothers Size,” like its spirituality, is a kind of thrumming undertone. McCraney has treated the subject directly elsewhere, not only in the film “Moonlight” but also in his play “Choir Boy,” which like “Saturday Church” set a coming-out story within an explicitly religious frame.

The haunting epigraph of “The Brothers Size,” not stated in the show but present in the published script, is from Proverbs 18: “A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” Whether by our biological relatives or the chosen family of a church community, we are bound to each other. The Bible’s original sibling rivalry comes to mind: We are in fact our brothers’ keepers, and they ours.

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.