When the New Orleans native Courtney Bryan was still in high school, she got her first taste of contemporary opera in the form of André Previn and Philip Littel’s A Streetcar Named Desire, after Tennessee Williams. In her first foray into composing opera, she, too, ventures into the Williams funhouse of Southern Gothic fever dreams. For many of the playwright’s fans, Suddenly Last Summer found its definitive form on celluloid, shaped by the masterly hand of Joseph L. (All About Eve, Cleopatra) Mankiewicz. Katherine Hepburn (who loathed him) appeared as the iron-butterfly matriarch Violet Venable, who is forever nattering about “my son Sebastian,” who is no longer living, and tends “well-fed” Venus flytraps in a conservatory she calls “The Jungle.” Elizabeth Taylor (later Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra) played Catherine Holly, the poor relation who was there when Sebastian met his horrific fate and won’t shut up about it. A little slice of the scalpel to Catherine’s frontal lobe ought to quiet her down, Violet reasons, dangling a million-dollar check for a new wing at the hospital under the nose of a neurosurgeon she wants to perform it. Daniel Fish, whose astonishing Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma! originated at the Fisher Center, returns to direct. Bryant’s Catherine is Mikaela Bennett, who has won acclaim in such diverse roles as Maria in West Side Story, Rosasharn in Rick Lee Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath, and as the learned and possibly heretical abbess’s favorite novice in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s medievalist Hildegard. Though a diva, Bryan’s Mrs. Venable must land her “arias” the way she does in the play—not in song but by means of the spoken word. Count on Tina Benko—nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Nobel Prize-winning Elfriede Jelinek’s monodrama Jackie—to deliver just the right snap. —Matthew Gurewitsch