You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian-Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company’s untethered revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo” are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them.

But it’s nothing as palpable as a hurricane that keeps knocking them off balance and making them flail like sandpipers in a heavy wind. To understand what’s sweeping through this production, which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday with a cast led by a valiant Marisa Tomei, listen to the words of Assunta, a wise old Sicilian signora.