Two dramatic lessons on the nature and power of art have opened on Palm Beach County stages this weekend, first Red at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, and now The Pitmen Painters at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

Like a vividly transportive painting, plays about art and artists can plunge us into fascinating worlds that provoke at least as many questions as they answer. In the case of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, those questions include: What is art? How does it make you feel? Is it supposed to make you think? Can anyone be an artist? Who owns art?

Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot (the inspiring story of a working-class boy whose life is transformed through dance), examines history, class, politics and all those artistic questions in his warm-hearted play. Though the second act gets weighed down by political content that isn’t as resonant here, the play is mostly beguiling. And Dramaworks, enjoying a smashing first season in new Clematis Street home, is giving The Pitmen Painters a superb production exquisitely staged by J. Barry Lewis.

The Pitmen Painters is a fact-based play about British miners who set out to take an art appreciation class and wind up becoming painters themselves. The Ashington Group, “outsider” artists from northeast England, spent the half century from 1934 to 1984 painting, exhibiting and (at least initially) working their dangerous 48-hour weeks in Northumberland’s coal mines.

Through the Workers’ Educational Association, more than 30 miners signed up for a weekly art appreciation class in 1934. Hall focuses on four representative types and one fully fleshed-out character, played wonderfully at Dramaworks by an excellent group of Broadway-tested actors .

George Brown (Dennis Creaghan) is the by-the-books union man. Harry Wilson (Rob Donohoe) is a passionate Marxist. Jimmy Floyd (the amusing and bemused Colin McPhillamy) is an easygoing fella who would rather paint dogs and still-lifes than convey the brutal underground world the men know so well. George Brown’s young nephew (Joby Earle) is a restless lad on the dole. Oliver Kilbourne (Declan Mooney) is the miner-painter whose compelling journey carries us through the play, as he moves from a world defined by hard work, sacrifice and duty into a place of creativity and critically impressive observation.

John Leonard Thompson plays Robert Lyon, the painter and teacher whose work alters the miners’ lives even if he doesn’t always grasp his own intellectual condescension. Kim Cozort is the upper-class art patron Helen Sutherland, an elegant woman who makes a potentially life-altering offer to Oliver, one complicated by class, simmering sexual tension and the miner’s fears. Betsey Graver has a sweetly comic turn as Susan Parks, a working-class model whose potential nudity throws the neophyte artists into a tizzy.

The production’s design elements are of a piece with the performances and direction: topnotch. Michael Amico’s meeting-hall set transforms into a manor house and an array of galleries, the latter thanks to Robert Goodrich’s multimedia effects. Erin Amico establishes era and class through her beautifully designed costumes. Sound designer Matt Corey bridges scenes with the overwhelming clang of the miners’ daily world. And Ron Burns works magic with his lighting, at one point simulating the slow departure of a train from its station.

As noted, The Pitmen Painters does lose some of its buoyancy and enchanting power in the second act. But Dramaworks’ production is a thing of beauty, start to finish.