FLEURS DU MAL.

Among modern playwrights, Tennessee Williams is unique in his fascination with the botanical world. Serafina, the heroine of his 1951 play "The Rose Tattoo," thinks of her love as "a rose of the world." And in his 1961 play "The Night of the Iguana," reptiles and similarly scaly humans slither in and out of the hot, wet flora of coastal Mexico, looking for love or denying it. Between those two plays, Williams wrote a number of others, but none was so full of chlorophyll as his 1958 one-act "Suddenly Last Summer," now in a strong revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company (at the Laura Pels).

The play takes place a few years before America entered the Second World War (and Williams's beloved older sister, Rose, underwent one of the country's first lobotomies), in New Orleans's Garden District, in an elaborate garden, which Williams describes as "a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests." Who is tending this mannered plot now that its owner, the poet Sebastian Venable, is dead? Why, his mother, Violet (Blythe Danner), naturally, who treats it as something of a shrine--or a lair. Resting lightly on her cane (she recently had a stroke, which she will not acknowledge as such), with her fingernails painted tulip red, Violet, despite her infirmity--or, perhaps, because of it--flirts with a young man who has come to pay a call: Dr. Cukrowicz (Gale Harold), whose last name, he says, means "sugar" in Polish. Violet's words drip like honey as she reveals her goal: to have Dr. Sugar lobotomize her niece, Catharine Holly (Carla Gugino), who, according to Violet, won't stop "babbling" about Sebastian's death. Once Dr. Sugar has performed the operation, she promises, she will write a much needed check to fund his research.

The trouble began, it seems, the summer before, when Violet was too ill to accompany Sebastian on his annual trip abroad, so he took Catharine, his beautiful young cousin, instead. While they were in Europe, Sebastian died. The details surrounding his death--as recounted by Catharine, in a long, alternately beautiful and overwrought monologue--are intolerable to Violet, who had turned a cloudy eye to her son's avaricious sexual nature, and to the way he made use of her to procure his clandestine consumptions.

The word "melodrama" originally meant a stage play incorporating music. But very few actresses understand the musical nature of Williams's dense language--the notes that are piled high and then higher, until they threaten to strain the voice and the nerves with their demand for pure feeling. More than oneactress has succumbed to the unadulterated surface hysteria of Williams's prose. When Elizabeth Ashley took on Violet in the 1995 Broadway production of the play, she went for the broad strokes and not the tremolo underneath, playing the fading old woman as though she were the Venus flytrap at the center of the garden which Sebastian tended with love and disgust.

Danner, on the other hand, understands that she must keep Violet grounded, making her as real a "monster woman" (as Gore Vidal referred to Williams's female friends) as possible. She plays Violet as a tease in iron petticoats, a stage mother whose primary audience--her exquisite, refined, educated son--has left her to a world of pernicious fools. She hesitates to impart bad news, then issues commands with the vocal force of an admiral during inspection. She lingers over the arc of Williams's words, pausing at the top of any given speech, then sliding down, breathless but in control. Danner's brilliant performance as Alma Winemiller in the 1976 television version of Williams's "Eccentricities of a Nightingale" remains unparalleled in its interpretation of the sadness and hope in the heart of an embattled romantic, largely because Danner didn't treat the words with reverence; she saw past the filigree to the character's tragic reality.

Danner's refusal to be intimidated by the text has inspired other players; here it influences Gugino, who is a fine actress in her own right. Her all-out, nuanced performance highlights the intellectual content of the play--its excoriation of the bored, cannibalistic rich as they ...