In his feverish one-act Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee Williams doesn't stipulate that the predatory, self-deluding Violet Venable has emphysema. Nevertheless, in the Roundabout Theatre Company's current Off-Broadway production, Blythe Danner and director Mark Brokaw seem to have decided that she suffers from the affliction as severely as she's driven by an aversion to the truth about her dead son, Sebastian. Every so often, Danner's Violet halts in the middle of a word to gasp distressingly for air; sometimes, she does this while flaunting a lighted cigarette in a holder with aging-belle haughtiness.

This is only one of the brave choices that the patrician, husky-voiced Danner makes in h[...]