“The Marriage of Figaro,” Mozart’s buoyant operatic comedy, is built on an infrastructure of political discontent. Although it sheathes its claws in time for a happy ending, this is an opera whose treatment of political inequality and sexual predation can feel strikingly relevant.

Is it also an opera about race relations? Could it be?

Anyone emerging from the War Memorial Opera House, where the piece is playing through Friday, Nov. 1, in a sprightly and theatrically alluring new production, could be forgiven for feeling uncertain about the answers to those questions. The new production, directed by Michael Cavanagh, sets the action of the opera in Colonial America, and it features one of the most racially diverse casts the company has called on for a standard repertory work in a long time.

Two excellent performers of color, the African American bass-baritone Michael Sumuel and the Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique, star as the servant Figaro and his bride-to-be, Susanna. Another African American singer, soprano Nicole Heaston, was brought in last month to replace the Irish soprano Jennifer Davis as the Countess — which means that both the aristocratic and the serving classes are racially integrated.

But is the audience meant to interpret these characters as actually being black? Evidently not, according to General Director Matthew Shilvock.

“The casting of this production preceded its conception,” he said during a recent interview. “The first person to be cast was Michael Sumuel, because we wanted him to take on that role. Then the Count and Countess were cast, and finally (artistic managing director) Greg Henkel and I heard Jeanine sing and thought, ‘That’s our Susanna.’

“We certainly knew that the reality of having a black Figaro and Susanna was going to raise dramaturgical issues, but we didn’t feel it was appropriate to deny Jeanine the chance to sing this role.”

Of course not — that pretty much goes without saying. And as Shilvock later pointed out, the company expects to revive this production in future seasons, and expects to be able to cast it with the best singers available, regardless of race.

But if the production, on Shilvock’s own testimony, has no intention of grappling with the issues of race, then what is gained by transplanting “Figaro” to a large manor house in 18th century America — one, in fact, that is more or less explicitly designed to evoke Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello?

In that very specific historical context, it seems to me, the opera’s themes of political and sexual dominance — of master and man, mistress and maidservant — have to be infused with some degree of racial awareness to have any potency at all. Trying to address that aspect of America’s founding without reckoning with the original sin of racism seems like a willful omission.

Consider, as an obvious counterexample, the brilliance of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” in which the white statesmen, matriarchs and military figures who attended the creation of the young nation are all embodied by performers of color. The effect is swift and clarifying, a fierce homily on who gets put in the foreground when history is written; even though the story of “Hamilton” is not explicitly about the nation’s racial history, the casting ensures that it isn’t overlooked either.

In the current “Figaro,” by contrast, the presence of black singers paradoxically serves to erase, or at least obscure, racial history. The traditional operatic practice of “color-blind” casting — in which the audience is expected to overlook the race of the performers involved — makes it easy to mentally spirit this piece away from its historical moorings.

Charles Chip Mc Neal, the company’s newly hired director of diversity, equity and community, said he prefers the term “color-aware.”

“We see the performers’ blackness; we’re not blind to it. We see the performers in all their beauty.” At the same time, he says, “We don’t always have to take stock of race.”

Indeed not. Even in America, where race is a constant historical thread, a director is always free to focus on other issues. The “Ring” Cycle that director Francesca Zambello created for the San Francisco Opera, for instance, skirts the matter of race almost entirely. In a famous 1988 production of “Figaro,” director Peter Sellars anatomized the American pathologies of wealth and power by setting the piece — little suspecting what the ensuing decades would mean for his decision — in Trump Tower, without saying much about race.

Cavanagh’s San Francisco production, though — which is the first part of a projected trilogy of productions devoted to Mozart’s operas with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte — does seem to touch lightly on race, only to shy away from the implications. The servants here are black, and subject to the sexual and physical tyranny of the white master, yet they’re not depicted as actual slaves.

The implication seems to be that we’re supposed to take race, as the saying goes, seriously but not literally. No wonder the production yields conceptual confusion.

The subject of race continues to bedevil the world of opera on a profusion of fronts. What do we do about the explicitly racist corners of the canon such as “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”? How do we cast works such as “Otello,” where race is ostensibly central to the drama? What steps need to be taken to ensure a wider diversity of artists both on and offstage?

These and other questions feel increasingly urgent, which is why Mc Neal’s presence in San Francisco is such a heartening institutional development.

“We have to learn to address the intersection of the historical canon with contemporary society,” he said. “We’re developing the muscles to have a conversation about this.”

The internal contradictions surrounding the new “Figaro” would seem like the ideal place to begin.

“The Marriage of Figaro”: San Francisco Opera. Through Nov. 1. $26-$408. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-3330. www.sfopera.com