Steve On Broadway (SOB)

Folks drown in this treacherous element. Unfortunately, that includes the show's luminous but misdirected and miscast stars (including) the two-time Oscar winner Jessica Lange, who brings a sleepy, neurotic sensuality to the role of the vital and domineering Amanda Wingfield.

Within its first 15 minutes, you feel the entire production sinking into a watery grave.

Ms. Lange could certainly be a model in such a magazine. Smooth-faced and compactly curvaceous, she portrays Amanda, a character modeled on Williams's mother, as a woman lost in erotic contemplation of the charming, sexy husband who abandoned her years before. Undulating by herself to the distant strains of dance hall music, or mistily recalling her glory days as the beau-besieged belle of her girlhood, Ms. Lange is less the image of Amanda than of another great Williams character.

That's Blanche DuBois, the illusion-addled heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, a role Ms. Lange played in her last appearance on Broadway in 1992. Though she received mixed reviews, with some critics complaining that she was inaudible, she now seems fully prepared, technically and spiritually, to take on Blanche again.

Though I missed Ms. Lange's highly praised portrait in Long Day's Journey Into Night in London several years ago, I can see from her Amanda how she might have been splendid as O'Neill's Mary Tyrone. But hazy lyricism and remoteness, which would have been perfect for Mary, don't suit Amanda, who for all her obsession with the past is a vivacious, determined go-getter. Ms. Lange captures Amanda's injured quality. But she summons the combination of heroic vitality and bitterness that Williams describes in the script only in the play's final moments.