It certainly provides a contrast to the misguided 2003 mounting, which starred the gorgeous, hardworking but overwhelmed Ashley Judd, an absurdly catatonic Jason Patric, and Ned Beatty—who wiped up the stage with both and then dissed them in the papers. This ensemble nails the semigrotesque hothouse texture of the work, delivering Williams’s languid, incantatory language in a Southern-black vocal idiom that makes it sound as if each line were tailor-made for them.

Act I belongs to Margaret (Rose), a.k.a. Maggie the Cat, the sexually deprived wife of Brick (Howard), a former college-football star and fallen scion of the Pollitt dynasty, now a hopeless drunk who pines for his deceased friend, Skipper. The cryptohomosexual Brick will not sleep with Maggie, denying her both physical satisfaction and a child to make them more desirable inheritors of his father Big Daddy’s estate. Big Daddy (Jones) thinks the doctor gave him a clean bill of health for his 65th birthday, but Maggie and Brick know the truth: His body is ravaged with cancer. Big Mama (Rashad) is being kept in the dark too. The lies we fabricate to live together also drive us apart, the play tells us. The action unfolds continuously, relentlessly, over one night in the Pollitt household, where the extended family has descended for Big Daddy’s anniversary party.

The production clocks in at three hours, a length that is partly due to Howard’s slack delivery. The baby-faced star is charismatic and sympathetic, but takes micropauses before his lines when he should be keeping pace. To be sure, Brick is a difficult, passive character: a drunken cipher who functions more as a sullen sounding board than a dynamic figure. He does have a piercing Act II speech about his friendship with Skipper. He denies it was ever sexual, insisting that it was almost mystically profound. Brick is a void into which the family members channel their powers.

Fortunately, the other actors have energy to spare. Rashad continues to astonish with her range. True, she’s mostly handed matriarch roles, but she finds great nuances within that category: beaten-down (Raisin in the Sun), mythic (Gem of the Ocean) and now, as Big Mama, a blowsy, bustling mix of clucking busybody and stoic martyr. Playing Maggie, Rose burns up the stage with tremendous sex appeal and drive. The compact but curvaceous performer owns her role: a desperate, hard-edged survivor who has trained herself to endure humiliation with a cultivated smile. Jones is a force of nature as Big Daddy, as complex a figure as Williams ever created. There is no easy strolling in this Tennessee: Big Daddy may, unexpectedly, espouse tolerance for homosexuality and sympathy for the poor, but he also has a sadistic relationship with Big Mama and fantasizes about chucking her for a younger bride. Sex and life are brutal matters, love is red in tooth and claw.

Brick notes that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Williams was the poète maudit with a naturalist’s eye for fruition, predation and decay. “Vitality is the hero of the play!” he wrote in a 1954 letter to the play’s first director, Elia Kazan, quoted in his recently published Notebooks. “The character you can ‘root for’…is not a person but a quality in people that makes them survive.” If the author is right, then this production is heroic indeed. It is nontraditional only in the most superficial way. Under the skin, the flesh is warm, the blood pounds away and the bones are solid. How wonderful to see the masterpiece everyone was talking about.