Review: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF sizzles at Bucks County Playhouse
Can you handle the heat?
There's a reputation attached to CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Perhaps more than one. It's one of Tennessee Williams' great Southern gothic stories. It's the most famous stage and movie role for the legendary Burl Ives, as Big Daddy. And it's one of Elizabeth Taylor's most iconic roles, as the vehement and wildly unhappy Maggie the Cat; this and WHO'S AFRAID OF Virginia Woolf are her great roles as the queen bitch of all actresses. The play seethes with the same humidity as a southern summer during a storm.
Eric Rosen directs the Bucks County Playhouse production of CAT in fine shape; the claustrophobic bedroom Maggie shares with her husband Brick is the sole set, in which the whole family squeezes to duke out all of their problems from cancer to jealousy to possible impotence and more than implied, but never settled, homosexuality. Tony nominee Elizabeth A Davis plays Maggie, all hiss, spit, and slither; her husband and foul, Brick, is played by Lucas Dixon, as a man who has no hope of keeping up with either his blistering wife or his scathing father and who has allowed his drinking to set him behind his smarmy brother Gooper (in an excellent performance by Tony Roach).
Brick is all bourbon and "I coulda been a contender" mentality crushed by his Best Friend's death, in Dixon's portrayal, slowly moving from disabled and drinking to drunk and pathetic in the presence of his clawing and scheming wife - who at the same time is still his only real support. Davis is a commanding Maggie, at the same time wisely avoiding too much comparison to Taylor's brilliant but stage-eating catwoman. Dixon is soul-crushed and bowed, barely hanging on to dignity and not caring if he retains it. He's the perfect foil for the sober but sleazy Gooper, whose sole claim to superiority over his brother is provable virility by virtue of frequent reproduction.
The joy of this production, besides Rosen's deft handling of what is now a slightly dated plot, is not only Davis' claws but Wayne Duvall's spot-on Big Daddy, a cotton millionaire on death's doorstep with no place to go, who absolutely crackles here. Duvall (Robert's cousin), likely identifiable to audiences from the films LINCOLN and BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU, is born for the part. All eyes are drawn to him when he's present on stage, no matter how many family members are squeezed into Brick and Maggie's bedroom. Big Daddy loves Brick, hates his own wife, and doesn't like much besides his property and his son... and he's not always sure about Brick. The tension between Dixon and Duvall is as fierce as the tension between Dixon and Davis on stage, if not perhaps greater. The shock of Big Daddy knocking his son, on a crutch and a cast, to the floor is one of the most powerful moments in the show.
Forget the film if you've seen it, though it's hard to do so. Williams wrote for the stage and the story is much better on one. Film loses the encroachment on space, the tension, the near-tropical humidity stifling the moment. And the film loses much of the clarity of the references by Maggie and Big Daddy to their suspicions about Brick, and Gooper's broader insinuations about Brick and Maggie... reminding us that a married man should never occupy a bedroom directly adjoining his brother's. If the entire story being set in the bedroom isn't claustrophobic enough, it becomes clear that even in the entire Politt mansion there is no room for privacy, mental or physical.
At Bucks County Playhouse through May 23, with sterling direction and a riveting cast, it's well worth the time to see this classic. Here's an observation for you: the audience leaving the playhouse was so moved by the emotional and physically staged storms on the stage that people on their way out the door in daylight were looking for the rain they were sure had hit outdoors. Come be swept up in that same theater magic yourself.
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