She is shattered from the start. Natasha Richardson walks onstage in the opening moments of “A Streetcar Named Desire” looking jittery, unready, like a woman already lost to the world. The New Orleans into which she stumbles is a sweaty, treacherous dive. A woman sings the blues; grubby street archetype make deals and break them. Eight ceiling fans spin over the stage, and all around us. A scene this chaotic would unhinge even a strong sort of person – one much stronger than Blanche DuBois.

Edward Hall, the formidable young British director, has stripped the glamour from Tennessee Williams’s play. John C. Reilly’s Stanley Kowalski could not be further from the sexy brutishness of Marlon Brando. As Mitch, Blanche’s erstwhile suitor, Chris Bauer neither looks nor dresses impressively. Even Ms. Richardson, a great beauty, manages to appear distressed here.

But the most surprising sight at Studio 54 is a glimpse of Tennessee Williams being staged competently. The last few Broadway seasons have featured revivals of two Williams masterpieces, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie,” that failed so completely that I began to suspect a conspiracy to discredit their playwright. (“Stella! Stell-ahhhh!” Stanley screams after he abuses his wife and tries to get her back. In this spirit, the Broadway community ought to consider gathering in Shubert Alley and offering an urgent, penitent yell to the heavens: “Tennessee! Tenness-eeee!”)

Mr. Hall respects the intentions of the playwright, finds a creative way to invoke his world, and mounts a production that abounds with moments of tension and pity. In all of these departments, he opens a great deal of daylight between himself and his countrymen, Anthony Page and David Leveaux, who are to blame for “Cat” and “Menagerie,” respectively.

A calamity avoided is not the same as a triumph achieved, alas. Williams, the doomed poet laureate of the American stage, wrote a handful of plays from which we expect more than skillful staging and mostly adequate acting. If a classic play has been staged triumphantly, we ought to require assistance afterward, to need an emotional stretcher to tote us up the aisle. I’m being romantic, I realize, but Mr. Hall inspires such expectations. His staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at BAM last season wreaked just this kind of wonderful havoc. There was so much joy and pathos in it – so much not just to admire, but to love – that anything less than bright victory from the pairing of this director and this playwright can’t help but disappoint, a little.

Of the three leading ladies to essay a Williams heroine on Broadway lately – Ashley Judd and Jessica Lange are the others – Ms. Richardson proves the most satisfying. (This is not a bold claim.) As Blanche settles in with sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley, the memory of those despairing first moments onstage continues to haunt. She balances Blanche’s weakness against her pathological coquettishness, as in her riveting scene with the young man (Will Toale). There’s no pressing reason for this encounter to exist; in other words, it’s the kind of masterstroke that separates a genius like Williams from the rest of the herd. The boy has come to make a collection. She makes small talk, asks him the time, won’t let him leave. “So late? Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour – but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands – and who knows what to do with it?” Does that sound like a ferocious come-on? Just wait: “You – uh – didn’t get wet in the rain?”

It’s one of the few times Ms. Richardson does justice to Williams’s poetry. (Another is the end of the scene in which she reveals her broken past, particularly the husband she drove to suicide by insulting his homosexuality. “Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!” she says, collapsing on Mitch’s shoulder. What an astonishing bit of writing that is.) But like Patricia Clarkson, who played Blanche at the Kennedy Center last year, Ms. Richardson doesn’t capture her richest poetry. Lost amid Blanche’s fluttering confusion, her final collapse into madness proves strangely unmoving.

What is it with British directors and catwalks? Like the scenery for the Wingfield apartment in “Glass Menagerie,” Robert Brill’s set for “Streetcar” includes an iron balcony suspended over the neatly abstracted rooms of chez Kowalski. It is toward this balcony that Stanley proffers his famous yell. Typical of the rough-hewn way he approaches the role, Mr. Reilly makes “Stella!” sound like “Stah!”

Mr. Reilly has an unsettling moment early in the play. He rambles on about the Napoleonic Code, eager to prove how much he knows. Something in the tone rings familiar. Ah yes, the knowledgeable palooka: It is the tone of Cliff Claven from “Cheers.” This is a wiser approach to Stanley than it seems. When Mr. Reilly makes it work, he creeps toward a new interpretation of Stanley, one that owes nothing whatsoever to Brando. His eyes disappear beneath heavy brows: all forehead, jowls, and chin. He has a body, but not a physique. He smells bad. (When he takes off his shirt, apres bowling, Blanche makes a discreet grab for her perfumed handkerchief.) Drunk, he marauds around with fearsome power. There’s something to admire here. What the amiable Mr. Reilly misses, crucially, is the core of real malice in Stanley. He may be violent, but he is not mean.

Mr. Reilly gets a major lift from actress Amy Ryan, the show’s magnetic Stella. Her feel for the role has deepened since she played it in the Kennedy Center production last year. Mr. Reilly’s Stanley may not be quite what Williams had in mind, but Ms. Ryan treats him with such devotion that we believe in him. At moments Ms. Ryan quietly runs away with the show. A lovely woman tolerates an overbearing sister and an abusive husband: Why?

That may be the real proof of Mr. Hall’s modest success here. His show may not deliver the right emotional payoff, and may miss the Williams lyricism, but he has a marvelous grasp of the play’s relationships. Blanche, Stella, and Stanley cease to be stage icons and become husband and wife, sister and sister again. It’s not the triumph Williams deserves, but it’s a start.

Until June 19 (254 W. 54th Street, 212-719-1300).