2nd Story Theatre’s impressive production of the steamy, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tennessee Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, is a haunting theatrical experience, complete with stellar performances, a compelling story and an unsettling yet alluring stage set.

Masterfully directed by Ed Shea, 2nd Story’s Artistic Director, Williams’ Streetcar introduced the theater (and later, film) world to Southern belle Blanche Dubois, who "always depended on the kindness of strangers."

In a role originated on stage by Jessica Tandy and immortalized on screen by Vivien Leigh, Blanche is the quintessential fallen woman, seemingly aware yet completely oblivious to the unfortunate hand life has dealt her.

The story begins when Blanche (Barb McElroy) arrives at the New Orleans home of her newlywed sister, Stella (Rae Mancini), for a supposed visit. Stella’s cramped two-bedroom flat is hardly ideal for a high society matron like Blanche, yet she manages to make herself at home.

Unfortunately, Stella’s husband, the hot-headed, high-strung Stanley Kowalski (Ara Boghigian), locks horns with Blanche from the moment they become acquainted. Stanley despises his sister-in-law and her prissy ways, and his hatred turns to distrust when she announces the family estate, Belle Reve, was sold without his wife’s knowledge or permission.

Stanley wants Blanche out of his house, but Stella acknowledges her sister has nowhere else to go. The tension between husband and wife causes a violent argument in which Stanley strikes Stella, but the audience learns how quick she is to forgive him (Marlon Brando’s bellowing of her name, amidst a torrential rainstorm, is a recognized great moment of cinema) and later admits to Blanche she is "sort of thrilled" by his petulance.

Meanwhile, Blanche has become taken with Stanley’s poker buddy, Mitch (Mark Gentsch), a modest everyman who lives with his ailing mother. Blanche and Mitch’s budding relationship comes to a grinding halt, however, when Stanley confronts Blanche about her mysterious, checkered past.

The play touches upon a multitude of once-forbidden topics of discussion--mental illness, domestic violence, statutory rape--that are no less controversial today than when this work was written more than fifty years ago.

As the title indicates, Blanche, Mitch, Stella and Stanley are all caught in a psychological web of desire, each desperate to hold on to (or let go of) their respective fantasies and realities.

The role of Blanche poses a considerable challenge for any actress and McElroy is triumphant in her delivery. Her performance exemplifies the protagonist’s priggish nature and delusional state of mind. Mancini gives another fine yet somewhat understated performance and Gentsch plays the perfect unassuming gentleman.

Boghigian feasts on the role of Stanley, and both the audience and production benefit from it. He literally drips with attitude, contempt, and exudes a purposeful, necessary arrogance.

Events transpire for this troubled foursome on a dark stage that perfectly captures the sullen beauty of seedy New Orleans circa 1950.

In the history of modern theater, there is before A Streetcar Named Desire and after. The initial 1947 production is indelibly tied to Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, which was founded in the same year. Marlon Brando, who starred in the original production, was not the first the actor to use method acting, but for many he was the first actor who embodied it.

In Tennesse Williams' Streetcar, Blanche Dubois (Barb McElroy) is suffering from what might now be diagnosed as Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder after multiple deaths in her family, the loss of her ancestral home, Belle Reve (think Tara), and her job as a high school English teacher. The purpose of her trip to New Orleans is ostensibly to visit her sister Stella (Rae Mancini), who is married to Stanley Kowalski (Ara Boghigian), an ex-G.I. The sad truth is that she has no where else to go.

All of Blanche’s possessions fit into a single steamer trunk. The contents of the trunk include ratty fur pieces and worn-out ball gowns. If one dug around long enough they might find a rat-nibbled wedding cake. Though she hasn’t any money to her name, Blanche still sniffs at the two-room, barely furnished apartment that her sister shares with her husband.

Stanley takes an instant dislike to Blanche, believing that she has swindled Stella out of her share (and his share and their unborn child‘s share) of a family fortune. Stanley is determined to discover and expose the truth about Blanche.

At one of Stanley’s frequent poker games Blanche meets Stanley’s co-worker and friend Mitch (Mark Gentsch). Mitch is single and has a job and a ill mother whom he dotes on. Blanche is smitten and spends the rest of the play trying to seduce him with her false modesty.

Stanley soon discovers that Blanche has been essentially run out of her hometown for being a woman of loose morals. Blanche’s unsavory reputation was capped by her affair with a 17 year old boy. His worse suspicions confirmed, Stanley shares the information with Stella and with Mitch.

The stress of the situation sends Stella into premature labor. Stanley and Stella rush to the hospital. While Blanche is alone in the house she is visited by Mitch who rails against her deceit. When Stanley returns, he vents his rage at Blanche through rape. Blanche’s psychotic break is now complete.

Trevor Elliot has created a set with intricate wrought iron that invokes the molder and decay of mid-century New Orleans. I am, once again, overwhelmed by an elaborate set with the use of limited space. When faced with the dilemma of what to do with all of the additional iconography that accompanies Tennessee Williams’ landmark play, director Ed Shea mostly ignores it and successfully creates a production that can stand on its own. In the 1951 film adaptation, the three characters are roughly equal. In the play, Blanche is the pivotal character. This is one of a few differences from the 1951 film that audiences may pick up on.

Shea obviously paid careful attention while casting this production. The principals give solid performances. Ara Boghigian gives a rich performance as the volatile Stanley. Rae Mancini’s does a fine job as Stella, though she is a bit reserved. Barb McElroy give a nuanced performance as Blanche. McElroy looks like a schoolteacher, more like Jessica Tandy than Vivien Leigh. McElroy nails the deluded nature of Blanche, especially during monologues, and struggles only slightly with the dreamy or flighty nature.

Whenever someone refers to Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” it’s impossible not to think of Marlon Brando. Like a reflex, an image of the actor who played Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and in the 1951 film pops into one’s visual memory, hovering like a ghost around any performance, waiting for attention if not comparison.

So major kudos to 2nd Story Theatre for a production of “Streetcar” that is strong enough to push Brando to the wings while its actors re-create for us the visceral, violent tale of illusion vs. reality, of passion vs. pretension, and of desire.

“Streetcar,” in a way, is a story of two sisters. Blanche DuBois is the erstwhile Southern belle, whose circumstances, like her beauty, aren’t what they used to be. Having lost the family estate to deaths, ill fortune and probably mismanagement, she has come as a last resort to stay with her sister, Stella, in the cramped, dark New Orleans apartment that Blanche says looks like it was decorated by Edgar Allan Poe.

Stella had left home long before the tribulations that afflicted Blanche, trading genteel society for the gritty reality of marriage to the crude but magnetic Stanley Kowalski. He’s not just several rungs below her socially, he’s not even on the same ladder. But she is wildly attracted to him and willing to endure his mercurial personality and his rough treatment because of that desire.

While the South of the DuBois family was one of tradition and inherited status, Stanley is used to fighting for his place in the world. Luck is nothing more, he says, than “believing you’re lucky.” He’s antithesis of the refined but fragile Blanche.

From the moment Blanche arrives, she and Stanley are destined to clash over culture, personality and, arguably, Stella. Stella tries to keep the peace, but confrontation is inevitable — and violent.

The fascination with the play lies in its complex characters, and one of the strengths of 2nd Story’s production is that it lets audiences sort things out for themselves. Director Ed She allows the events to unfold without spinning them to one point of view or another.

Actor Barb McElroy creates Blanche DuBois with all her intricate personality traits. She is convincing in Blanche’s emotional fragility, but shows us a nastier side when she criticizes Stella for running away from Belle Reve, their family home, leaving her, Blanche, with all the responsibilities. That moment, at the start of the play, sticks in your mind as Blanche’s illusions devolve into delusion.

Rae Mancini makes believable a character that we would identify today as an abused wife. Fifty-two years after “Streetcar” was written, counselors would be advising Stella to get out of the marriage. But when Mancini says she’s crazy about Stanley, you can believe it.

As Stanley Kowalski, Ara Boghigian may channel Brando in small gestures, like the way he hunches over his plate at the dinner table, but the combination of braggadocio, bullying and at the bottom, insecurity, is Boghigian’s own. He looks the part, and he acts the part — although he doesn’t make it look like acting. His brutishness becomes an intrinsic part of his good looks and charisma because those qualities are the tools he uses to get through life.

The set, created by Shea and designer Trevor Elliot, is a combination of the specific and the general. The confines of the Kowalskis’ two-room abode are reinforced by cramming kitchen, dining and living “rooms” into a tiny space at one corner of 2nd Story’s black box theater. Small details speak volumes, like the uncomfortable looking metal cot that has to suffice as the once-privileged Blanche’s bed.

But much of the action and dialogue takes place in bare space surrounded by the audience, with details left to the imagination. When the actors are out there, attention hones in on details like their body language or specifics of Ron Cesario’s purposely dark costumes.

The ghosts of iconic performances like Brando’s never will go away, but for the approximately two hours that we are in the hands of 2nd Story’s artistic troupe, the ghosts don’t matter. We’re engrossed in the people before us and the drama of their lives. Emotions run high, but nothing is overblown, and that straightforward approach turns into a great strength.

The ride on the trolley is often tense, and that’s the best part. And there are times you might like it to move a little faster, and push the plot.

A Streetcar Named Desire has pulled into 2nd Story Theatre. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tennessee Williams still has appeal, more than six decades since its 1947 debut. And the appeal, in a word, is dysfunction. Everyone in the two-act, two-hour play seems to have it.

The cast is 11 characters, but only four are central.

“Stella!”

Yes, this is that play, with Stella Kowalski and husband Stanley. There’s also Stella’s sister Blanche DuBois and Stanley’s bowling buddy and poker pal Mitch. The play looks at class distinctions, at honesty and hypocrisy, decorum and desire, passion and power.

Stanley has the power. And he wields it, and Blanche vies for it.

Stanley, a gruff, blue-collar worker in New Orleans is played by Ara Boghigian, who seethes with convincing anger, which occasionally erupts in verbally and physically violent outbursts. He swaggers with mercurial volatility around the dark and sparse stage that serves as his dreary apartment. He often wears no shirt. He speaks and acts tough.

And his good-natured wife Stella, played by Rae Mancini, is the recipient of his actions — his yelling, his slapping, punching and holding. Theirs is a classic domestic-violence relationship. Yet Stella can’t bring herself to leave. And the reason, in a word, is sex.

“There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” Stella says.

And though Stanley’s rage initially scares Stella, she learns to live with it, and, oddly, likes it, saying she’s “sort of thrilled by it.”

Stella says this to Blanche, who’s staying with her sister for a time. And Blanche can’t see anything redeeming in Stanley, whom she calls an “animal.”

Blanche is played by Barb McElroy, who portrays the character as emotionally fragile, more so as the play progresses. Blanche bemoans the loss of her youth, innocence and beauty, and regrets the past that she admits to. Then other characters make her bemoan her past that she wished they hadn’t discovered.

That’s the honesty vs. hypocrisy component of the play — Blanche as a vulnerable, almost psychologically unbalanced woman of self-described “old-fashioned ideals,” who, we learn just before her arrival at her sister’s, was a serial floozy.

Enter the nice guy: Mitch. He’s Stanley’s friend, played by Mark Gentsch, and is thoughtful, polite, sensitive, courteous and gracious. His character seems the most stable in the cast, although even he eventually lets his decorum lose to his desire. Mitch and Blanche have a budding relationship that goes bad.

The best parts of the play, directed by Ed Shea, 2nd Story’s artistic director, involve Stanley’s hostility and animosity. And these parts are good. But there are lulls in this classic, such as the somewhat slow date scene between Mitch and Blanche that could be tightened for today’s audiences.

If A Streetcar Named Desire were a person, it wouldn't be able to sleep at night, tossing and turning in a fever sweat, aching for basic human connection. The Tennessee Williams classic, directed by Ed Shea, is being staged at 2nd Story Theater through May 24. The production demonstrates how difficult it is to convey larger-than-everyday-life emotions.

This was the first of a string of five Williams plays, powered by sexual longing that was sometimes suppressed but usually flaunted, which burst onto the American theater scene starting in 1947. Its refreshing frankness earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the appreciation of theatergoers for unblinking psychological honesty.

In bold contrast is the representative dishonesty of one character in particular. Blanche DuBois (Barb McElroy) is an arche-typal faded Southern belle, displaying insincere gentility like a tattered peacock. She has "lost" the remnants of her family's Mississippi estate, once a prosperous plantation, and has fled to New Orleans and her estranged sister, Stella (Rae Mancini). The playwright's irritation with the hypoc-risy of his native South oozes off the stage in the first minutes. Blanche tries to appear polite but repeatedly reveals annoyance that her sister is living under "these conditions" in her simple two-room flat; she keeps going to the whiskey bottle, while affecting well-bred restraint.

Stella's husband is Stanley Kowalski (Ara Boghigian) — crude, of Polish extraction, an uncultivated primitive next to Blanche and her air of refinement and cultural pretenses. And he's a hunk. On their first meeting, he removes his shirt in the sultry heat, and Blanche's demure aura is in danger of burning off like a mist.

The relationship that works best in this production is an incidental one. Mitch is a coworker and friend of Stanley who takes a romantic interest in Blanche. As presented by Mark Gentsch, he is considerate and a little moody without being a wimp, characterized as he is by taking care of his dying mother. Like Amanda Winfield's gentleman caller in The Glass Menagerie, Mitch is Blanche's last hope, a chance to finally be taken care of, not to mention loved, as long as he doesn't find out about her sordid past.

McElroy's take on Blanche has her more knowing than self-deluded about the gap between her frail persona and her tempered-steel core. For example, when Stanley shouts at her to "cut out the rebop," to stop pretending, McElroy has her take that in stride, closer to smug than upset. This is a knowing Blanche, which underscores the desperation we're aware she's feeling.

As Stella, Mancini is straightforward, a woman energized by passion for her man. Stella could use some of the frailty that her sister feigns, though. A little of that would have provided solid groundwork before her conversation with her sister when she excuses Stanley for hitting her; we need to see the relationship that keeps that twisted dynamic alive.

The lack of a successful Stanley in this Streetcar makes the melodramatic elements of the play, the norm for its time, glaring. Boghigian sustains only a single note for Stanley — simmering, frustrated anger that explodes with unnecessary frequency. There are few rest stops for him to allow his petulance to fade. As a result, there is no normal human tension here, no Stanley who momentarily regrets his impulsiveness before giving into it yet again. Director Shea even has him punch Stella on the jaw, drunk, rather than slap or backhand her. That's another unnecessary excess, especially in front of his poker buddies, that further weakens any connection we've made with him. Stanley then shouting "Stella!," regretfully calling to her as the character famously does, consequently falls flat.

It's permissible in theater these days to forgo place-specific accents, especially in Shakespeare when the period context is changed, such as, say, Richard III set in modern wartime. But there's a problem with dropping drawls in this play, wedded as it is to place and time. If nothing else, Blanche's obsession with her heritage of Southern aristocracy makes it important. As it is, this production of A Streetcar Named Desire is stripped of its charm as well as its angry soul.