DURHAM - Before Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern's revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" begins, nothing seems far out of the ordinary. John Galt's sprawling set has a few anachronisms, but Triangle theater is generally done on the cheap.

And besides, Little Green Pig's staunch conceptualism has a streak of the sillies. The plastic paint cans upstage? The cultish "[Expletive] Frank Gehry" T-shirt slogan scrawled on a calendar? No big deal.

Lamont Reed, done up like a walking voodoo doll, is creeping around the stage, but "Streetcar" does take place in New Orleans. Four musicians idle on an upstage platform behind a screen, like the protectively caged barroom bands of old. Tennessee Williams has a "blue piano" in his stage directions, though, and there's a keyboardist up there -- and anyway, the band isn't playing. There's scratchy New Orleans R&B on the PA system.

The lights fade. There's a heavy, loud, live 4/4 rataplan from drummer Jason Fagg, and the quartet plunges into Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)," with company doyenne Dana Marks on vocals. The Napoleonic Code, as the combo is called (an in-joke that the play quickly reveals), sounds a little like the Patti Smith Band circa 1976.

Now we see Stanley and Stella Kowalski (Jeff Alguire and Gigi DeLizza) -- stark naked. They romp around their squalid apartment, then dive into their unmade bed.

And with these acts of artistic vandalism, Williams' classic begins.

In walks Blanche DuBois, probably the greatest tragic heroine of the American theater. Nicole Farmer's portrayal is bravura but traditional: the ardent Southern belle unhinged by madness. She is wearing a lovely old dress. It soon seems that director Jay O'Berski might be playing a game like Robert Altman's in his film of Raymond Chandler's 1953 crime novel "The Long Goodbye": Drop an archetypal, principled hero (Philip Marlowe, via Elliot Gould) into a corrupt future (druggy Hollywood, 1973), and enjoy the ensuing temporal dissonance. Is this 1940s Blanche in neo-punk New Orleans?

But then something strange -- or rather, not strange -- happens: O'Berski's staging goes straight. The actors, company regulars undaunted by the host of famous actors preceding them in these roles, lose themselves in the play. The Napoleonic Code's interludes abandon avant-garage rock for swampy, New Orleans-approved standards such as Louis Armstrong's "Lawd, You Made the Night Too Long" and Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You." The lingering conceptualist touches become harmless distractions.

"Streetcar" starts generating its ineluctable heat and momentum. After the intense scene that ends with Stanley hitting his wife, Alguire sobs and bellows "Stellaaaa!" with deep, Brando-like gusto -- and it is convincing. A few minutes into Act 2, as the company surges through Williams' tragic machinations, you may have relinquished your concern about Little Green Pig's brand of theatricals.

Did you forget about the loud rock music and the naked actors? About O'Berski's immutable directorial aesthetic? Did you miss the group's last show, "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant," which threw a supermodeling curve at an old Fassbinder play and bent it into a fierce, feminist shape?

That first, jarring moment was a setup, a disarming: Sex and rock 'n' roll always come with drugs, and this is New Orleans. ("I don't want realism," Blanche pines, "I want magic!") As "Streetcar" rolls to its end, O'Berski's gris-gris may strike you as an intoxicant or a jape, inspired or jejune, depending on your sensibility. Suffice it to say that Tennessee Williams will turn in his grave when he hears about it. That's a hint.

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