When the New Orleans native and MacArthur fellow Courtney Bryan was in high school, contemporary opera came at her in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire, adapted from the Tennessee Williams classic by André Previn and Philip Littel. For her own first opera Bryans follows their lead 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 Mankiewicz) presided as the iron-butterfly matriarch Violet Venable, forever nattering about “my son Sebastian” (deceased) and tending “well-fed” Venus flytraps in a conservatory she calls “The Jungle.” Elizabeth Taylor (later Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra) squirmed in agony as the Venables’ poor relation Catherine Holly, who was there when Sebastian met his horrific fate and will not shut up about it. Violet wants her lobotomized and is dangling a million-dollar check under the nose of a susceptible neurosurgeon to make it happen. Contrary to operatic convention, Bryan reserves song for a single character. Catherine sings. The rest talk, even Violet, flaming diva of the spoken word. Bryan’s opera reached the stage this summer at the Fisher Center, Bard College, directed by Daniel Fish, who developed his revolutionary, Tony-winning reboot of Oklahoma! on that same campus some seasons ago. The Philadelphia transfer stars Bryan’s original Catherine, the versatile soprano Mikaela Bennett, whose credits include Maria in West Side Story, Rosasharn in Rick Lee Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath, and the learned (possibly heretical) abbess’s pet novice in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s medievalist Hildegard. As we go to press casting for Violet, originally Tina Benko, has yet to be announced. Mikhaela Mohony, who served as Fish’s associate director at Bard, superintends the production, in tandem with music director, Nathan Koci, who’s been music director since this journey’s beginning. —Matthew Gurewitsch