TV REVIEWS : Redgrave Rises in ‘Orpheus Descending’

Vanessa Redgrave, unemployable on Broadway after her anti-Zionist remarks on Oscar night 12 years ago, finally returned to Broadway last year in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ 1957 drama, “Orpheus Descending.”

Thank God those Redgrave-baiters-and-haters dissipated their clout. The actress and this neglected play were meant for each other. You can see the dynamics of the union in Peter Hall’s semi-operatic television adaptation of his Broadway and London production today on cable’s TNT (at 5 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.).

This drama, quintessential early Williams, is set in a small, bigoted Southern town and swirls around the relationship between a lyrical and sensual drifter (the Southern-fried Orpheus of the title) and the town’s eccentric women of damnation, chiefly Redgrave’s tormented, Italian immigrant storekeeper.

Like its purple plot, the play’s history is full of bruises. It bombed as Williams’ first full-length production, under the title “Battle of Angels” in 1940, was maligned in its Broadway reincarnation in 1957 and failed as a Marlon Brando-Anna Magnani-Sidney Lumet movie (“The Fugitive Kind,” 1960).

But Hall’s production takes the melodrama and Williams’ obsessive violence and sex--the primary sources of critical carping--and creates a churning, theatrical, even at times comical hell on Earth. Except for substituting a blow torch for ravenous killer hounds at the fadeout, the TV production is true to the play, particularly its blend of recrimination, lust and religion.

The style is not naturalistic. The visual tone, with some montages, is alternately garish and pastoral/dreamlike.

Williams’ lost, victimized angels (the indelible Redgrave as a blond “wop” among racist apes, and Kevin Anderson as the guitar-playing vagabond who moves in with her) are scorchingly vulnerable. Redgrave, back to the camera, is naked in one scene, which is an artful example of nurturing nudity.

Hall hasn’t reined in this drama’s excesses but has given them flight. The vivid supporting characters are alternately gross (Sloane Shelton’s florid magpie), ravished (Anne Twomey’s haunting, nympho-dipso temptress), or heartbreaking (Miriam Margolyes’ sweet visionary painter).

The narrative opening of two gossipy women superimposed against a wild car ride in a downpour is stylistically crucial and hurtles you into the plot.

Ultimately, the musician drifter (who suggests a post-”Glass Menagerie” Tom Wingfield) turns to the searching Redgrave heroine with the sardonic words: “The make believe answer . . . love.” You remember that irony at the KKK-hooded ending, which will shock plenty of viewers. Even for those who know the play, it’s wrenching.