Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Memphis Flyer

Like the classic drama’s pivotal character, Brick Pollitt, a frustrated alcoholic who lost the one great, good, true thing in his life and now spends his days drinking till he feels peace, Theatre Memphis’ revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a handsome, aging wreck still waiting for “the click.”

Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning script is 62 years old, but there’s still plenty of life left in its gleefully profane old body. Time may have been kinder to The Glass Menagerie, but Cat has aged well enough. It’s still a potent meditation on family, legacy, mortality, and the terrible lies we tell ourselves to keep on living. The play’s most famous character, Maggie the Cat, Brick’s manipulative, Nashville-trash wife, is as fascinating as she ever was, and Natalie Jones gives the character plenty of genuine Ole Miss je ne sais quoi. The cast is beautiful. The design is nifty. But opening night at Theatre Memphis was plagued by slow cues and sputtered lines that made the show crawl like cold molasses.

Williams’ nods to King Lear aren’t subtle. The author’s own ambitions are also fairly evident. He wants this play to come on like a devastating force of nature and leave audiences feeling like they’ve weathered a thunderstorm of Biblical proportions. To that end, director Anita “Jo” Lenhart’s production is too cool, too formal, and far too rigid. It’s too many perfect lines, cut on the bias, against the grain of a play that that coos and whispers, before it roils, then boils, and, per the play’s famous Dylan Thomas epigraph, rages against the dying of the light.

Cat‘s top-shelf cast of actors walk those rigidly proscribed lines like everybody knows where they’re supposed to go, but nobody’s entirely sure why they’re going there. Words and ideas get lost in business, and those that aren’t lost are projected, in an actorly manner occasionally resembling human speech.

Williams built Cat like a piece of music, weaving distant conversations over croquet, phone calls from neighboring rooms, the sounds of children shrieking and tearing about the grounds, fireworks, and a wild storm, with aria-like monologues and explosive confrontations. The story of brothers competing for a birthright conjures Biblical images of Jacob and Esau and Christ’s parable of the prodigal son. The characters may be petty, but there are no small themes here. Cat wants to be epic at every turn.

Speaking of epic, Bill Baker is a heroic force for good in Memphis theater. His personal work is experimental and essential, but rare forays into more traditional drama are also reliably satisfying. For reasons difficult to identify, Baker’s struggling in the role of Big Daddy and only occasionally connects with the coarse “Mississippi Redneck” who made a fortune, and, unaware of his positive cancer diagnosis, is planning to spend his twilight years in an extravagant sexual escapade. Key lines of dialogue just weren’t there when he needed them.

Few things are harder for an actor than playing a character who only wants to disappear. Presumed homosexual Brick Pollitt is one of the most sadistically sullen, inward-focusing characters ever imagined for the stage, and, like so many actors before him, the usually excellent Gabe Beutel-Gunn fights to stay in scenes and on task. Jones is more successful, as Maggie, who’s eaten up with longing but willing to do whatever it takes to avoid being old without money. As is the case with everybody else, Jones’ blocking feels choreographed, and her long, jazzy speeches could stand a lot more clarity and color. Kinon Keplinger and Shannon Walton are pure competence as the family’s chief breeders, Brother Man and Sister Woman. Their brief but memorable appearance, in supporting roles, are the night’s most fully realized performances.

Lenhart has assembled such an incredibly strong, smart cast it’s impossible to imagine this Cat won’t land on its feet when the performances settle. The click, however, requires confidence. And nothing expresses doubt like a pre-show curtain speech assuring audiences that, in spite of whatever they may think, a main character is indeed using his crutch appropriately, “according to extensive research.” Y’all, please.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Theatre Memphis through May 14th

In the second act of Tennessee Williams’ 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy Pollitt, a rich Delta planter deceived by his family into believing he’s not dying of cancer, tries to have an honest conversation with his alcoholic son Brick, who stopped sleeping with his wife Maggie and crawled into a bottle shortly after the death of his best friend Skipper. The coarse old man tells rambling stories of his days sleeping in hobo jungles, talks about the time he spent working as an overseer for “that old pair of sissies” Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, and tells his favorite, presumably gay son about the one thing you can grow on 28,000 acres that’s more valuable than cotton: tolerance. Hoping to keep Brick from following his friend into an early grave, he says he’s seen too much of the world to be shocked by a little same-sex loving and loosely suggests that he might have even known a bit of it himself.

It’s a strange sentiment to come pouring from the mouth of a character Williams describes as a “Mississippi redneck,” and Brick, a former football star and the epitome of 1950s masculinity, is revolted by the ease with which his father addresses the forbidden topic. The painful confrontation causes the younger Pollitt to take a kind of revenge by telling the truth about his father’s condition. It’s the play’s most brutal scene, and 52 years after Cat‘s Broadway premiere, Williams’ poeticized language still rings true, even when the actors delivering the dialogue are a little wooden.

Joneal Joplin is an effective, functional Big Daddy, though he brings nothing new to a role originally defined by folk singer Burl Ives. Joplin strides about the stage cursing in a booming radio announcer’s voice burdened with an aristocratic drawl. Like so many Big Daddys before him, Joplin ignores the character’s rough, impoverished back-story and makes him into a foul-mouthed Foghorn Leghorn. The clichéd Southern affectations are particularly glaring compared to Joe Murphy’s understated but occasionally electrifying Brick.

Brian Mott and Dana Terle both do excellent work as Gooper and Mae, a pair of grotesques representing “the breeders” among us. Wordlessly, the couple fill the room with lies using little more than a glance or a hand signal. Irene Crist is an equally understated Big Mama, finding strength and sass where other actresses usually resort to cheap tears.

Maggie the Cat, Brick’s ambitious, sexually frustrated wife, is one of Williams’ most celebrated heroines, but in the wrong hands her endless monologues can be shrill and annoying. Joy Marr finds little of the character’s inherent sex appeal but accomplishes her goals well enough. One gets the sense that she’s no more interested in sex than Brick but determined to get her rightful share of the family inheritance.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is easily Williams’ most classically themed play, borrowing hugely from Shakespeare’s King Lear and the collected work of Russian realist Anton Chekhov. The dialogue is intricate, entrancing, and loaded with iconic imagery of the American South. The action seems right at home on Larry Brown’s beautifully realized set, which subtly uses at least one unsubtle image: The tree branch hanging over the veranda immediately conjures up visions of Gone with the Wind. It’s a kitschy element but an effective one in a play that reminds us that tomorrow is indeed another day for those lucky enough to make it through the long, dark night.

When Drew Fracher visits Playhouse on the Square to direct a classic, it usually means Memphis theatergoers are in for a pleasant surprise. Under his supervision, Macbeth was expertly transformed into a visually staggering rock-and-roll nightmare about sex, power, and addiction. His expressionistic vision for Of Mice and Men placed Steinbeck’s migrant workers in a world turned, quite literally, on its side. Compared to these two efforts, Fracher’s Cat seems uninspired — good, but not great.

Through February 25th