Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Michael Menendian
At the Raven Theatre, Chicago
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on Dec. 19, 2010
The image of a cat dancing on a hot tin roof is an amusing one. But the thought of its leaping to the ground is a good bit less humorous. There's no dearth of symbolism in Williams' plays, and, as I've said before, a production can rise or fall on how a company handles that symbolism, even in the presence of mediocre acting. But for some reason, Raven Theatre's current production of Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof diverted my attention away from the symbolism and toward that one particular human shortcoming that lies at the heart of this story. Admittedly, though, if one advocates enlightened self-interest or believes in evolutionary imperatives, then the word "shortcoming" might yield to something closer to moral neutrality, like "expedient tool".
Cat recounts one day in the disturbed life of the Pollitts, a wealthy American family on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Big Daddy, the patriarch, has built an empire that now includes 28,000 acres of the "richest land this side of the valley Nile". Today is his 65th birthday, and he's feeling festive on having received the news that his recurring stomach pains are the result of a spastic colon rather than cancer. Through the course of the day, we discover a
de facto family policy of evasion, illusion, and dishonesty, while watching these behaviors, especially in synergism with resentment and greed, continue to wreck relationships and destroy dreams. Nevertheless, opportunities for redemption arise all the while, opportunities that are ironic inasmuch as their source is the very set of sins that created the need for redemption in the first place.
Maggie is the wife of Brick, Big Daddy's younger son -- and his favorite. She's curvaceous and vivacious, basically
a tender woman with a conscience, but possessing retractable claws and the willingness to use them. When we join the story, two resolutions are driving her decision-making: first, never to be poor again, and second, to win back Brick's affection, which he's been cruelly witholding ever since the death of his friend Skipper. Skipper had probably been in love with Brick and, at Maggie's urging, had confessed as much to him over the telephone. But upon hearing his friend's revelation, Brick abruptly hung up; this rejection drove Skipper to drugs and alcohol, which ended his life. And Brick himself now drinks from morning till night, or at least until he hears what he describes as a "click" in his head. As a football player and sports announcer, Brick lives in terror of being labeled homosexual. Accordingly, he insists that his friendship with Skipper was unusual only for its purity, cleanness, and decency.
The subjects of homosexuality (anathema then) and of miserable marriages in general don't have to be the pivot point of this play. Nor does Maggie, even though she's the titular metaphor, going so far as to call herself "Maggie the Cat". In fact, unlike many productions of this piece, Raven's doesn't focus on Maggie at all, whether on her struggle to ensure her own future or on her effort to cope with her husband's humiliating indifference toward her. Instead, Raven's staging swirls around the resonance between Big Daddy and Brick, a father-son pair whose relationship embodies the silence on all matters emotional that typified the time. On this particular day, however, the two face off and clear the air, at Big Daddy's insistence and despite Brick's refusal, a refusal that slowly softens to mere reluctance. And this is where Raven's production became compelling.
By nature, Big Daddy is a truculent boor, a crude, lecherous curmudgeon with a vicious tongue. He's a self-reliant man who despises his devoted wife of 40 years and dislikes his other son, Gooper, and Gooper's prolific wife, Mae. He apparently believes that his dishonesty about his own feelings over the years has caused his family to slide into a habit of avoiding the truth, at the least, and of lying outright, at the worst. Although Jon Steinhagen's characterization was true to these uglier traits, he surprised me by revealing Big Daddy's capacity for gentleness. It was a gentleness that implied not only sympathy or compassion, which would have been surprising enough, but also some understanding, as though there existed a synchrony of thought between the two men. As Williams fashioned him, Big Daddy has something of a laissez-faire attitude toward homosexuality, reflecting a breadth of mind very atypical for a proper masculine man of the 1950s. He himself speculates that quasi-isolation has insulated him from the "ideas of other people". But Steinhagen took that hereticism futher in making me wonder whether Big Daddy had the benefit of experience in guiding Brick toward the truth. His skillful alternation of Big Daddy between two conflicting personae allowed Jason Huysman to show Brick's cautious but steadily growing trust in his father. Huysman expanded the third dimension of Brick's personality into the distant vanishing point that Steinhagen painted, such that I was even more impressed to witness their long-standing stalemate mature into a reconciliation that brought them face-to-face with the dodging and equivocating that had kept them apart for so many years. They discovered a common disdain for mendacity that, even if it didn't set them free in the secular sense of John 8:32, did set them on a course for acknowledging and rejecting their own foolishness.
In venting his disgust at "mendacity" to Big Daddy, Brick gives voice to the play's unifying theme. In the Pollitt family, the truth hides in the closet. Brick refuses to face his emotional reality. Gooper and Mae feign conscientiousness in order to advance their own greed. Big Mama, despite Big Daddy's open contempt for her, deludes herself into believing that she has her husband's love. Even Big Daddy himself has been pretending to care about family members he actually detests. Gooper, Mae, the family physician, and the family pastor all keep the truth about Big Daddy's terminal cancer from him, and from Big Mama. Until the end, however, Maggie seems the least dishonest of them all, although the lie she eventually does tell the family is, in the vernacular, a whopper. Nevertheless, it's Maggie's attempt to borrow from a future truth -- only a hope at this juncture. It seems that she'll do whatever is necessary to secure her future; so, we might argue that it's a lie in letter but not in spirit. But because this lie will be easy to detect, and because Big Daddy will likely die first, Maggie's motivation may not be altogether reprehensible.
Liz Fletcher's Maggie didn't have the sinister overtones that would have implied a habit of lying to people. Rather, there was a restrained despair, resigned yet persistent, that smacked of an honest heart empowered by a respect for practicality. Fletcher made it easy to believe in Maggie's basic goodness. Although her characterization was interesting, her delivery was recitative, as though she was reading her lines off a ticker tape. The expository first act, which features Maggie, is almost a monologue for her, and the unnatural absence of hesitation from her speech became monotonous.
Huysman, whom I discussed earlier in his exchange with Steinhagen, made Brick's uncommunicativeness with Maggie almost maddening and his willful detachment from Gooper and Mae's scheming all the more strange. He was a profound contrast to Fletcher's impassioned Maggie and to JoAnn Montemurro's daft, vulgar, and hysterical Big Mama. Greg Caldwell and Eleanor Katz brought out the sleaziness of Gooper and Mae, but without stopping at cardboard cutouts. Caldwell made me believe in Gooper's lifelong jealousy of Brick as Big Daddy's favorite son, and the interplay among Caldwell, Steinhagen, and Huysman stirred some sympathy for the older brother. Katz put Mae's obsession with social status at the intersection of an overgrown adolescent and a mature woman, making her confrontations with Fletcher's more-moderate Maggie quite telling.
In view of Williams' affection for the South, one wonders whether dishonesty is something he regarded as a tool for protecting Southern Romanticism, a natural consequence -- or maybe cognate -- of the Victorian practice of euphemization. Or perhaps he saw it as a glaring paradox in Southern culture, part of the dark underbelly, or as a universal element of human culture, albeit implemented uniquely in gentile society where he grew up. In any case, he raises but leaves unanswered several questions, two of which are whether there's such a thing as passive lying and whether good intentions can exonerate an untruth.