That makes life a mighty lonely business. And the production uses the expanse of the Apollo stage to define the unbridgeable distances among people. The setting is Big Daddy’s mansion — or to be specific, the bedroom of his alcoholic older son, Brick (Mr. O’Connell), and Brick’s wife, Maggie (Ms. Miller). It is Big Daddy’s 65th birthday, and though his family has yet to tell him, recent tests have revealed he has terminal cancer.

As designed by Magda Willi, this is no chintz-filled boudoir out of Southern Living. The two indispensable pieces of furniture — a bed and a vanity table (with a mirror) — are in place. And there’s an open shower, which Brick makes use of, clothed and unclothed, to drown out the din of family strife.

Otherwise, there’s nowhere to hide. The dwarfing metallic walls are the color of money — shades of copper and silver and gold, according to Jon Clark’s masterly lighting. (Alice Babidge’s glitzy “Dynasty”-style costumes carry out the theme.) It’s a bleak temple to materialism, a sort of modernist version of the death-denying pyramids of Egypt.

It is also as stark as a doctor’s examining room. And this production is always monitoring its characters’ vital signs. In the case of Ms. Miller’s Maggie, these are strong enough to make you think she must have considerably more than nine lives to trade on.

For years, I’ve admired Ms. Miller’s determination as a risk-taking actress onstage as well as onscreen. She seemed ill at ease in her Broadway debut, “After Miss Julie” (2009), but she was far better when she returned two years ago as Sally Bowles in the revival (of the revival) of “Cabaret.”

With Maggie, the poor but shrewd debutante who has married into money, Ms. Miller at last has a stage role she was born for, and she owns it unconditionally. The play’s first act is largely hers, as Maggie tries tirelessly to talk her seemingly insensate husband (who’s broken his foot while drunkenly jumping hurdles) into behaving at Big Daddy’s birthday party and, more important, returning to their marital bed.