To paraphrase a bit of street knowledge, "payback" can be extremely unpleasant for those on the receiving end of it. It’s a principle that applies to the wealthy as well as those who are actually "on the street," and it percolates like an underground river, slowly rising to the surface, in The Actors’ Group production of "The Heiress."

The 1947-vintage drawing-room drama is playwrights Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s take on a 19th-century short story by Henry James about a wealthy and domineering man, his plain and timid daughter and the young man who professes his love for her. Director Peggy Anne Siegmund and her lead actors revive those conflicts vividly at TAG.

The year is 1850. Catherine Sloper (Therese Olival) is a painfully shy woman who lives with her wealthy widower father, Dr. Austin Sloper (Gerald Altwies), in the most prestigious section of New York. Morris Townsend (Dezmond Gilla), a relative of in-laws, is a well-dressed gentleman who ran through his own inheritance and now lives in "genteel poverty" with his widowed sister and her five children. Catherine sees him as the first handsome and cultured man who has ever taken an interest in her; Dr. Sloper sees him as a fortune hunter.

Olival excels in a demanding and multilayered role, winning the audience’s sympathy in Act 1 as the painfully shy and socially inept Catherine tries desperately to have a simple conversation with visitors. And we wince at the cruel and insensitive comments tossed her way by her father.

With that performance to build on, Olival is all the more chilling and convincing when she portrays Catherine’s eventual metamorphosis.

Altwies skillfully balances the conflicting elements in the personality of a world-weary and emotionally numb man who accurately perceives almost everything that’s going on around him except the toxic impact of his comments on his daughter’s self-confidence. In modern terms, the man is guilty of verbal abuse. However, since Dr. Sloper sincerely sees his daughter as inept and unattractive, his suspicions about Townsend’s motives are natural and logical.

Gilla plays Townsend as a handsome cipher. Charming, articulate and cultured, yes, but very much a gentleman of the "stiff upper lip" school.

Ann Brandman has stood out in recent years with vivid portrayals of strong men and vengeful women at the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival. For TAG she taps a completely different facet of her repertoire in the semicomic role of Dr. Sloper’s widowed sister, Lavinia Penniman, the enabler of the young would-be lovers’ relationship.

American English has changed tremendously since 1850, but TAG’s "Heiress" would be stronger theater overall if every member of the cast delivered their lines as if they were flesh-and-blood people communicating with one another rather than actors reciting stilted, archaic "dialogue." Did the New Yorkers of 1850 really speak that much more slowly and enunciate each syllable with so much more thoroughness and precision than their modern counterparts?