Although he never saw this until last January, he was so pleased. It was *exactly* what he was trying to do.

'Cat' still purrs, although actors stray a bit in characterizations




By Ed Blank
TRIBUNE-REVIEW BROADWAY CRITIC
Tuesday, December 9, 2003

EDITOR'S NOTE: This play was seen as part of the Tribune-Review's fall Broadway theater trip

NEW YORK -- "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," the late Tennessee Williams' favorite of his many plays, returns to Broadway a muted beauty.

The play is the lair of Big Daddy Pollitt, a character inspired partly by the playwright's father and the one he felt he drew to a finer point than in a Williams work.

Generally regarded now as the second- or third-greatest work in Williams' canon, behind "A Streetcar Named Desire" and possibly "The Glass Menagerie," "Cat" plunges for nearly three riveting hours into themes Williams revisited frequently from different vantages: birth, death and the transience of life; longing and repression; lust and denial; riches and rapaciousness, and the enduring irony of unrequited love.


Much of the new revival's reputation has to do with its fidelity to the playwright's vision. Williams had modified the text of the original 1955 production, mainly the third act, to satisfy director Elia Kazan's feeling that it needed a more positive and hopeful coloration.

The bowdlerized, if impeccably rendered, 1958 film version was more hopeful still, including the suggestive tossing of a pillow in the final shot.

A 1974 Broadway revival restored most of the original pre-Kazan text, retaining only the changes Williams had decided were improvements. The current revival is only a shade off the 1974 text, with a tweak that makes the final exchange more ambiguous.

Anthony Page's production is being performed at Broadway's Music Box Theatre with mixed blessings but sufficient luster to override its shortcomings.

The play is set on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1950s on Big Daddy's 65th birthday.

After five years of battling cancer and clarifying his life perspectives, Big Daddy lives momentarily with the mistaken belief that he's been troubled by nothing more than a spastic colon from which he will soon recover.

The rest of his family knows better, or soon will.

Older, disfavored son Gooper (Michael Mastro) and nakedly avaricious wife Mae (Amy Hohn), more often called Sister Woman, are expecting their sixth child. No one shares their anticipation of another "no-necked monster" like their first five.

The favorite son of Big Daddy and Big Mama is Brick (Jason Patric), a former golden boy football star hobbling on a broken ankle with a crutch that is the play's symbolic centerpiece.

Something is amiss in the marriage of Brick and Margaret (Ashley Judd), or Maggie the Cat. She's nicknamed for the feline shrewishness with which she fences with Mae and Gooper as they try to appropriate Big Daddy's fortune prematurely.

Brick and Maggie haven't shared a bed since before the suicide of his best friend Skipper, a comparably macho and damaged soul whose attraction to Brick she fatally exposed.

Brick has walled himself off physically and emotionally from everyone. The carnally frustrated Maggie tries to melt his reserve while his bulldog of a father plays the suit he shares with Brick, a contempt for "the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity" and anything that smacks of hypocrisy.

It is ironically Big Daddy's ignorance of his own condition that allows him to restore the order to his life that he had surrendered to others while distracted by health worries.

Judd is a valiant Maggie but only an intermittently persuasive one. Grappling with elocution in a way that calls attention to itself, hers is an agitated Maggie, sniping but disclosing nothing languorous in her yearning for marital satisfaction.

In the part of his rewrite that pleased him, Williams made Maggie more sympathetic. Judd's Maggie seems annoyed, mostly, that her miscalculated interference in the Brick-Skipper relationship has backfired and that it derailed a game plan rather than just a marital relationship.

Patric's Brick is unusually detached, adrift in alcohol, as if he truly were beyond reach and not necessarily worth restoring. He is, though, the embodiment of a rock to whom others naturally gravitate.

I had looked forward especially to seeing Ned Beatty's interpretation of the vulnerable vulgarian Big Daddy, but he missed the performance attended. Taking over with considerable authority was Edwin C. Owens, who normally plays Doctor Baugh.

The imposing Owens, with girth to match his temperament, has lots of bark and plenty of bite, growling with a ferocity that can shake scenery and hoist the whole production to a new level.

In demeanor he's most suggestive of Burl Ives, who did the part in '55 and in the movie, and Pat Hingle, curiously enough the original '55 Gooper. Owens' key revelation of Big Daddy is of a perishable life force.

Nary a laugh from the text is overlooked, especially those generated by Hohn's hyper-ambitious Mae and Mastro's Gooper, who is so helplessly doomed to live in the shadow of a younger, bronzed deity of a brother despite Brick's anger and indifference.

Margo Martindale's portrayal of Ida, better known as Big Mama, is a special asset, an uncommonly sympathetic matriarch given to nervous silliness around her obstreperous husband.

She jangles from an overloaded charm bracelet she hauls on her wrist uneasily, as if it were a cow bell announcing her movements. It suggests noisily, as the item does in life, the sentiments of its wearer.

"Cat" remains one of the theater's sustained dramatic pleasures, encouraging us to sift, like Big Daddy, through lies and evasions, even if at a price. There isn't a character among the six principals who doesn't singe his claws on that hot tin roof.