DANGEROUS LIAISON: Silva Vaccaro (Dylan McDermott) pursues his seduction of Baby Doll (Susannah Hoffman), as passions for vengeance and love coincide, in Tennessee Williams’s  “ Baby Doll,”  adapted for the stage by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre through October 11. (Photo by Richard Termine)

Baby Doll Meighan, 19-year-old virgin wife of middle-aged Archie Meighan, lies provocatively sucking her thumb in her tiny bed as the lights rise on McCarter Theatre’s American premiere production of Baby Doll, adapted by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann from Tennessee Williams’s “scandalous” 1956 movie.

Almost 60 years ago, the image of Baby Doll (played by Carroll Baker) in her crib-sized bed, blown up on a 135-foot long billboard above the Victoria Theatre on Broadway, where the movie debuted, incited the wrath of the Catholic Church and the National Legion of Decency (“grievously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency”). The New Republic called the movie “The Crass Menagerie” and Time magazine described it as “possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited.” Though the scandal caused the movie to be withdrawn from release in many cities, it was, unsurprisingly, a box office success and a huge publicity-maker for the author.

McCarter’s Baby Doll, though brimming with sensuality, erotic passion, and an array of sexually suggestive language and symbolism, is not likely to stir up so much controversy in 2015. Ms. Mann and Mr. Laville (who produced an earlier version in 2009 in France) have skillfully cut, focused, and clarified the original and vibrantly, tastefully, brought the riveting story to life on the stage.

Baby Doll is set in the Mississippi Delta in 1952, in and around the dilapidated old plantation house where Archie lives with his young bride and her elderly Aunt Rose. Strong passions and bitter vengeance — personal, commercial and romantic — prevail, as Archie finds first his cotton business, and then his marriage, threatened by a rival, Silva Vaccaro, a charismatic interloper, a Sicilian by birth.

The play is also — particularly here in Ms. Mann’s focus on Baby Doll and her resolution of an ending quarreled over by Mr. Williams and his director Elia Kazan — about the coming of age and sexual awakening of Baby Doll, who, trapped in a loveless marriage, discovers her sexuality and her true self under the powerful influence of Vaccaro.

Written a few years after The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and completed just after A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Baby Doll is full of classic Tennessee Williams atmosphere and themes, but, even in this fine adaptation and first-rate production, it is not in the same league with those great poetic masterpieces, the latter two of which won Pulitzer Prizes.

Ms. Mann, her four extraordinary actors, and a resourceful, experienced, top-notch design team make the most of this material and provide a thoroughly engaging, entertaining evening. Not easy to compete with the likes of Kazan and his all-star movie cast of Ms. Baker, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, and Mildred Dunnock, but McCarter’s production — though it does not completely overcome the tendency towards melodrama nor the disjointedness in the mix of dark humor with tragedy — does take full advantage of the immediacy of the stage experience, the on-target editing of Ms. Mann and Mr. Laville, and its superior cast and crew to provide a richer and more satisfying experience than the movie.

You won’t find here the poignancy of Menagerie, or the rich, complex relationships and the deep psychological struggles of Streetcar and Cat. Williams’s creations in Baby Doll are not of the iconic magnitude and depth of Amanda Wingfield or Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski or of Big Daddy and Brick and Maggie the Cat, but the four principal characters of Baby Doll are all of significant interest.

Susannah Hoffman’s Baby Doll is a sensitive, nuanced portrayal; of a young woman emerging from an oppressed, abused, infantilized figure into a full embrace of her womanhood and sexuality. Robert Joy’s Archie Meighan is a fine character study of an alcoholic, self-professed “peckerwood,” vainly lashing out to compensate for the financial, marital, and personal disasters he has created for himself. Dylan McDermott’s Silva Vaccaro, riding whip in hand, dynamically exudes menace, sexuality, and anger as he seeks revenge against the man who burnt down his cotton gin, then discovers romance with his adversary’s mismatched young wife. Patricia Conolly’s scatterbrained, endearing Aunt Rose becomes an increasingly important supporting figure, seemingly detached from the central conflicts of the play, but fighting her own battle for survival under Archie’s brutal regime.

Edward Pierce’s vast, elaborately detailed set and lighting masterfully create the world of this play. Depicting two floors plus attic and front yard of the crumbling Meighan house — fourth wall removed to enable audience’s view, the shadowy set is richly symbolic, reflecting the crumbling of Archie’s marriage and his life, as well as the decay of the Old South with its racial, ethnic, and gender prejudices. Only one thin pillar, perhaps an ironic reminder of former glories, remains on the front porch amidst the rubble of the front yard and the shadowy haze that pervades the set.

Darron L West’s sound design plays a major role in this drama, frequently evoking the offstage world of the play — birds, crickets, dogs, sirens, even the suggestion of the cotton gin and the world of the town, from which Archie and Baby Doll are isolated. A loud steel guitar between scenes throughout the play powerfully helps to create the mood, serving the purpose of a chorus commenting on events and warning of future consequences.

Costumes by Susan Hilferty are crucial and highly effective in establishing the four sharply contrasting principal characters, helping to reveal who they are psychologically and physically and how they relate to the other characters in the play and to the larger society.

Ms. Mann has directed with a sure hand to unify the production elements and to move the play swiftly towards its dramatic conclusion in less than two hours. Many captivating scenes hold the audience’s attention from start to finish. Particularly memorable are the unsettling interactions between the sex-starved Archie and his unwilling young wife, the dramatic offstage fire that burns down the Syndicate’s cotton gin but seems to ignite the fires of romance for Baby Doll and vengeance for Vaccaro, and, most strikingly, the prolonged dance of desire between Vaccaro and Baby Doll, which begins as a quest for revenge, but develops gradually into a powerful erotic and romantic attraction that transforms Baby Doll’s life.

In her program note, Ms. Mann describes the process of creating — or re-creating — Baby Doll at McCarter. “Adapting the screenplay of Baby Doll to the stage has been an exciting process. It felt akin to discovering a new Tennessee Williams play.” It’s a brilliant adaptation and production, a fascinating “new” work by the man who may be the greatest playwright in the history of American theater.