Fans of 2nd Story Theatre who are awaiting the arrival next season of A Streetcar Named Desire can content themselves with a lesser-known Tennessee Williams script now playing the downtown Warren stage. Orpheus Descending, Williams’ take on a sleepy Southern town upended by the arrival of a charismatic stranger, opened over the weekend and is enjoying a solid run, with strong showings from the leads and a few standout performances in minor roles.

Orpheus is not Williams’ best work, but it is an intriguing play, a wild and turbulent creation never lacking in emotional punch. And the 2nd Story cast, under the sure hand of director Mark Peckham, has been able to tap into those raw, untamed feelings.

Especially fine is the searing performance from a beardless Tom Oakes as brutish Jabe Torrance, the ailing owner of the dowdy dry-goods store where the action plays out. Oakes doesn’t spend much time on stage, but when he does show his face he’s stunning, crackling across the set like a jolt of electricity.

Oakes’ Jabe is rotting away from cancer, sent home from the hospital to die. He spends his days upstairs in bed, pounding on the floor with his cane to get his wife’s attention. But late in the play, he manages to shuffle his way downstairs, and his entrance is crushing.

Oakes’s Jabe is frail, uncertain of step, but still a bubbling pot of hatred.

But it is Rae Mancini as Jabe’s wife, Lady, and Kyle Maddock as the charming guitar-toting drifter, Val, who carry this production. Mancini and Maddock had history together playing opposite one another in 2nd Story’s A Month in the Country. Now they are burning up the stage once again as the illicit lovers in a much more potent drama.

Orpheus may not be well known, but it is classic Williams, in its examination of loneliness and loss set against the repression and bigotry of the Deep South. There are echoes of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Big Daddy in the character of Jabe.

The play was a flop when it first appeared in 1940 as Battle of Angels. Williams spent the next 17 years reworking it, but it has never had the draw or appeal of a play like Streetcar.

Jabe is just back from the hospital when the play opens. The doctors have given up on him and he has come home to die. That’s when Val, the mysterious outsider in a snakeskin jacket with a feckless past, appears on the scene. His car has broken down and he is looking for a place to stay before moving on.

After some cajoling, Lady Torrance agrees to take him on as a salesman in her husband’s dry-goods store. At first Lady keeps her wary distance. But she is a lonely woman trapped in a bad marriage, and Val’s charms are too much for her to resist.

Their relationship is more a slow smoldering affair that’s only suggested in a couple of torrid moments. Williams leaves it largely to the imagination to wonder what’s cooking between the two outcasts, as Jabe lies dying upstairs. And that, in a way, makes the dramatic crescendo at the end of the play all the more powerful.

Mancini has a natural affinity for strong, complicated women. She was memorable in A Month in the Country and sizzled in 2nd Story’s Hedda Gabler. Now, as Lady, she is emotionally hardened, scarred by her troubled past. Her Italian immigrant father was killed by the Klan, when his bootleg wine garden was burned to the ground for serving blacks.

The only thing Mancini doesn’t get right is her hit-or-miss accent, which tended to wander all over the place, sounding more Slavic at times than Italian.

But otherwise, hers is a forceful performance, full of yearning.

And Maddock continues to turn in impressive work as Val, a man who can “burn down” a woman, if he wants. He’s careful not to overplay his feelings, to keep a tight lid on his emotions, making him all the more tantalizing.

Laura Sorenson, on the other hand, goes in for pure histrionics as Carol Cutrere, the exhibitionist who has been ostracized by the townsfolk for standing up for blacks.

In lesser roles, both Vince Petronio as evil Sheriff Talbott, and in particular Lynne Collinson as his visionary wife, were excellent.

Welcomed touches of humor are supplied by a gaggle of village harpies, who serve as a sort of Greek chorus.

Trevor Elliott’s set, with its vintage cash register and pay phone, is pretty elaborate by 2nd Story standards.

While this not popular Williams, it is powerful stuff, a play that packs a wallop.

Orpheus Descending is such an urgent work that you can see how Tennessee Williams allowed an earlier version of it to pop squalling into the world before it was fully gestated. Currently, 2nd Story Theatre is staging a production (through April 20) that brings out much of the play’s life-and-death immediacy.

The part of the Greek myth that the title refers to has Orpheus, the greatest of musicians and inventor of the lyre, journey down to Hades after his wife Eurydice dies on the day of their wedding, to beg for her return to life.

Inspired by the myth rather than committed to its worldview, Williams makes little attempt to follow even that minimal plot line. He’s interested more in the general metaphor of an artist’s sacrifices and tribulations. Christian mythology is more significant to the playwright, as he fashions his Orpheus as a reluctant savior of which this brutal world is not worthy.

On his 30th birthday, the wandering Val Xavier (Kyle Maddock) slips into a small Southern town with his guitar and a new-found attitude that his hard-drinking, hard-living life must change. Wearing a snakeskin jacket that is his trademark, he wants to slough off his old ways. And that includes being no woman’s snorting stud, which is bound to complicate the arrival of a handsome young man in a land of unattractively feral men.

The most likely woman to pounce is Carol Cutrere (Laura Sorensen), the village brazen hussy and self-described exhibitionist. Williams eventually softens her carefree hedonism when she tells Val how the townsfolk despised her and had her arrested for a one-person march in a burlap sack to protest the ill-treatment of blacks. (The N-word is sprinkled throughout this play, and it’s not Negroes.)

The most benign character to begin with is Vee Talbott (Lynn Collinson), wife of the quietly mean sheriff (Vince Petronio). She channels her sexual frustration into a religious hunger for Jesus. She’s a painter and visionary, who trusts her feelings about things, so she’s proud of painting a church steeple a fiery red. Vee talks to Val about the drain and elation of creativity, and by the end of the play her two ardent skills end up striking her blind. By that point, our caring for her has less to do with sentimental obligation than with Collinson’s engaging depiction.

Vee has no carnal designs on Val, and initially neither does Lady Torrance (Rae Mancini), the proprietress of the dry goods store where the action takes place. She is the daughter of an Italian immigrant who settled in this town when she was a girl, opening a festive wine garden and making the mistake of selling liquor to blacks. Because of that, a mob burned down his orchard and her father was burned to death trying to save it. Lady has been married for 20 years to a bitter old man, Jabe (Tom Oakes), who has come home from the hospital, likely to die. By the cataclysmic end of the third act, Lady learns that he was one of the men who killed her father.

Director Mark Peckham lets Oakes all but spew spittle in portraying a man boiling with bile. Because of Oakes’s skill and because the character was written to epitomize such hatefulness, the performance is overwhelming instead of over the top, as it so easily could have been. What also allows that is a wonderful convergence, as Williams builds our expectations to the bursting point and the key characters tumble helplessly as if in a rapids, toward the fated culmination of each.

Mancini’s vividly inhabiting Lady is even more powerful than that of Oakes, because the performance grows tentatively and gradually, sometimes drawing humor from lines and situations not evident on the page. By the end, the effect is a wonderfully well-rounded person who we believe could save Xavier, if he hadn’t concluded that love is “the make-believe answer” to life. Maddock’s Val Xavier is an honest and convincing performance, intense. I would have appreciated, though, some similar extra dimensionality, perhaps backing off at some moments instead of always plunging ahead, to inform us that this bringer of beauty into such a forlorn landscape is fueled by more than ego.

On a set designed by Trevor Elliott that’s realistic but mysterious (characters emerge from background darkness), with moody lighting and sound design by Ryan Maxwell, these 17 actors do well in making metaphors seem quite solid.

Those familiar with the plays and films authored by Tennessee Williams can expect certain standard features in his work -- the deep South, unhappy marriages, freely flowing booze and corrupt persons of power. His lesser known, but no less powerful, Orpheus Descending, now playing at the 2nd Story Theatre, is quintessential Williams, complete with colorful characters, profound dialogue and a tragic turn of events. This production especially does both the playwright and its audience justice.

A handsome, young drifter, Val, arrives in a small southern town on his thirtieth birthday, determined to turn over a new leaf and leave his hard-partying ways behind him. With nothing of value on him other than a snakeskin jacket and guitar, he seeks employment at the local dry good store, owned and run by a woman named Lady. Counting the days until her ailing husband dies, Lady is suspicious of Val at first but quickly grows accustomed to the idea of having this charming, mysterious stranger at her beck and call.

Val soon becomes a welcome addition to Lady and several other women in town, including artist and sheriff's wife, Vee, as well as the young, gin-soaked Carol, whose older brother once had a relationship with Lady. Val and Lady eventually succumb to the sexual tension that builds steadily from the moment they first meet, and she invites him to secretly take a room inside the store. In typical Tennessee Williams fashion, the audience can immediately sense this development will most likely end badly -- for one or both of them.

Under the direction of Mark Peckham, coupled with the invaluable assistance of costume designer Ron Cesario, the performance space is perfectly transformed to an authentic, old fashioned store setting, including a vintage cash register, pay phone, showcase counter, and a stairwell leading to an upper-level apartment. Aside from being rich with symbolism (according to Greek legend, Orpheus was a musician who could charm the wildest creatures and tries to bring life and light into the dark Underworld), the story is a compelling portrait of racism, ageism and southern decadence. Any member of the cast is worthy of dissection and endless discussion.

Kyle Maddock plays Val with superb charisma and genuine sincerity that envelops the audience much like his character's effect on the townspeople. Supporting players worthy of mention are Laura Sorensen, who convincingly portrays Carol as a girl worthy of shame and sympathy, and Lynne Collinson as Vee, the visionary who unwittingly leads Val to tragic misfortune. Our leading female, Rae Mancini, delivers another unforgettable performance as the lonely, middle-aged Lady. She appears desperate, enraged, alluring and above all, vulnerable throughout each scene, and her control over the stage, like her character in the store, is seemingly effortless.

Despite its bleak outcome, 2nd Story's production of Orpheus Descending is a haunting, provocative, not-to-be-missed theater experience that will impress and amaze both fans of Tennessee Williams and those who can truly appreciate drama at its finest.