It’s clear that Tim Blake Nelson sincerely loves Socrates.

You may know Nelson as an actor from his turns in Coen Brothers works like the impossibly sympathetic and goofy Delmar in O Brother Where Art Thou, freaking out about his buddy being turned into a frog. Or, more recently, you may have seen him as the cheery and violent gunslinging “songbird” Buster Scruggs on Netflix. Now he’s written a play, Socrates, currently running at the Public Theater in New York, about the second-most salient self-sacrifice in human history. It’s poignantly set and incredibly cast, conjuring a world of Plato and Aristotle and Aristophanes that’s engrossing. It’s full of love, and it’s full of rage.