The Classics Theatre Project presents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Susan Sargeant
My thoughts on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or…plantation problems aplenty
The Classics Theatre Project presents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Susan Sargeant
The greatest compliment that I can pay to this tremendously powerful production of the Tennessee Williams classic tale of whiskey-soaked unrequited love and family power struggles is that for almost two and a half hours I did not once squirm in my seat, check the time, or maybe even take a breath. This Cat on a Hot Tin Roof redefines riveting theater. Director Susan Sargeant has given the audience a gift that is disturbing, intriguing, and erotic.
The first thing you have to do is get the movie version of the play out of your mind as it bears little resemblance to the play you will see. 1958 Hollywood was just not ready to deal with a play that includes repressed homosexuality and sexually unfulfilled marriages. This is Tennessee Williams at his scorching, pull the covers back best, raw, uncensored, and thrilling.
The acting here is the element that makes the play so riveting. Olivia Cinquepalmi as Maggie will make you totally forget Elizabethe Taylor in that iconic slip. Cinquepalmi dons the slip and makes the part her own. Cinquepalmi’s Maggie is indeed catlike, sometimes aggressive, sometimes demure, but always unafraid to make her needs known. She is a woman in control of her emotions and knows how to play the cat and mouse game better than anyone. She fears nothing and will stop at nothing to get her alcoholic husband back in their bed.
Joey Folsom, who also did the scenic design, is Maggie’s husband and most beloved of the two Pollitt family sons, Brick. Brick, recently injured in some late-night hijinks must depend on a crutch to get around and to reach his other crutch, alcohol. Brick is drunk for almost the entirety of the play and Folsom plays the part with whiskey swilling, ice crunching, fall on the floor honesty. Brick tells Big Daddy he drinks because of mendacity, but it is actually because of his role in the suicide of his best friend Skipper, with whom he has a homoerotic, but, according to Brick, never physical relationship. The scene where Big Daddy tries to find out the truth from Brick is superbly acted by both Folsom and Terry Martin.
Brilliant somehow does not seem a strong enough word to describe Terry Martin as Big Daddy. Big Daddy is a man of great wealth who is used to getting his way. He is also a man who holds secrets, the main one being that he has never loved his wife of forty years. Whether he is thundering orders or quietly observing the foolishness around him, Martin’s Big Daddy commands the stage. Martin’s presence is almost as intimidating to the audience as it is to Reverend Tooker, played with trembling comic relief by John Pszyk, as he desperately tries to stay out of Big Daddy’s way. Big Daddy does have one fear: death. The subtle, but obvious, changes Martin brings to the character of Big Daddy after he learns of his mortality are, once again, brilliant.
Lulu Ward is a touching and sympathetic Big Mama. She is a woman in denial about her life. She is unloved by her husband yet dotes on him even after he tells her to leave him alone. Ward is the epitome of a woman in the Southern gentry, fussing over everything and everybody, and trying to hold her family together. Watching the skillful Ward go from almost officiousness around the family to almost hysteria when she learns the truth about Big Daddy’s prognosis, was scarily real.
As Gooper, the Pollitt’s first son, but clearly not the chosen one, Bruce Witkowicz, brings just the right degree of smarminess to the character. He is a successful lawyer with five children and one on the way, and still cannot win the affection or approval of his father or mother. Witkowicz in a carefully restrained performance only rarely reveals his jealousy of his brother and the anger of being displaced in the primogeniture.
As Gooper’s wife Mae, Jenny Webb, is the shrill defender of Gooper and determined for him to take his rightful place in the family. Webb makes Mae the eavesdropping, resentful woman you love to hate as she constantly touches her bulging stomach to emphasize that baby number six is on the way.
Stephen Miller as Dr. Baugh does not have many lines except to reveal BIg Daddy’s truthful condition to Big Mama, but he is every bit the genteel Southern doctor with hands folded in front of him.
As the “no neck” children of Mae and Gooper, Isabelle Witkowicz, Nadine DeBerardinis, and Rosalie Williamscraig are all suitably loud and obnoxious.
Draperies hanging elegantly over columns in the background place the action in a bedroom in a wealthy plantation owner’s home in Folsom’s scenic design. Bruce Coleman’s outstanding costumes bespeak of wealth from Big Mama’s regal purple dress replete with a purple faux corsage to Maggie’s large diamond ring and shiny barrettes. Everything is lighted expertly by Gabe Coleman and sound is designed by Lowell Sargeant.
It has been a long time I have seen a drama as compelling as Susan Sargeant’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the intimacy of the venue makes it feel like an almost immersive experience. We become much like the eavesdropping Mae and Gooper, waiting for secret after secret to be revealed to us. This is theater at its most dynamic and profound.
