Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

BOOZE FLASH Howard, left, drinks to shut out Rose.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Some conservative theatergoers might be inclined to accuse the African-American Cat on a Hot Tin Roof of inauthenticity—or, to cite the play’s dominant theme, mendacity. Tennessee Williams never intended his wealthy Mississippian Pollitt clan to be other than white. Besides stage directions for “Negro” servants, the play’s one reference to black people is a slur, uttered by Big Daddy in the second act. The patriarch brags about quitting grade school “to work like a nigger in the fields” at a plantation, where he thrived and which he finally bought. Now the line says more about social status in black society than white.

Does that take away from the play? Not at all. This revival—directed by Debbie Allen and starring Anika Noni Rose, Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad—rings the opposite of false. The cast understands the hot, repressed, bluesy-jazz world of Williams as well as any ensemble you could imagine. In so intensely inhabiting the passions, humor and politics of the 1955 drama, these actors have rediscovered it for themselves and for us. The black Cat is truer Williams than we have seen in some time.

It certainly provides a contrast to the misguided 2003 mounting, which starred the gorgeous, hardworking but overwhelmed Ashley Judd, an absurdly catatonic Jason Patric, and Ned Beatty—who wiped up the stage with both and then dissed them in the papers. This ensemble nails the semigrotesque hothouse texture of the work, delivering Williams’s languid, incantatory language in a Southern-black vocal idiom that makes it sound as if each line were tailor-made for them.

Act I belongs to Margaret (Rose), a.k.a. Maggie the Cat, the sexually deprived wife of Brick (Howard), a former college-football star and fallen scion of the Pollitt dynasty, now a hopeless drunk who pines for his deceased friend, Skipper. The cryptohomosexual Brick will not sleep with Maggie, denying her both physical satisfaction and a child to make them more desirable inheritors of his father Big Daddy’s estate. Big Daddy (Jones) thinks the doctor gave him a clean bill of health for his 65th birthday, but Maggie and Brick know the truth: His body is ravaged with cancer. Big Mama (Rashad) is being kept in the dark too. The lies we fabricate to live together also drive us apart, the play tells us. The action unfolds continuously, relentlessly, over one night in the Pollitt household, where the extended family has descended for Big Daddy’s anniversary party.

The production clocks in at three hours, a length that is partly due to Howard’s slack delivery. The baby-faced star is charismatic and sympathetic, but takes micropauses before his lines when he should be keeping pace. To be sure, Brick is a difficult, passive character: a drunken cipher who functions more as a sullen sounding board than a dynamic figure. He does have a piercing Act II speech about his friendship with Skipper. He denies it was ever sexual, insisting that it was almost mystically profound. Brick is a void into which the family members channel their powers.

Fortunately, the other actors have energy to spare. Rashad continues to astonish with her range. True, she’s mostly handed matriarch roles, but she finds great nuances within that category: beaten-down (Raisin in the Sun), mythic (Gem of the Ocean) and now, as Big Mama, a blowsy, bustling mix of clucking busybody and stoic martyr. Playing Maggie, Rose burns up the stage with tremendous sex appeal and drive. The compact but curvaceous performer owns her role: a desperate, hard-edged survivor who has trained herself to endure humiliation with a cultivated smile. Jones is a force of nature as Big Daddy, as complex a figure as Williams ever created. There is no easy strolling in this Tennessee: Big Daddy may, unexpectedly, espouse tolerance for homosexuality and sympathy for the poor, but he also has a sadistic relationship with Big Mama and fantasizes about chucking her for a younger bride. Sex and life are brutal matters, love is red in tooth and claw.

Brick notes that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Williams was the poète maudit with a naturalist’s eye for fruition, predation and decay. “Vitality is the hero of the play!” he wrote in a 1954 letter to the play’s first director, Elia Kazan, quoted in his recently published Notebooks. “The character you can ‘root for’…is not a person but a quality in people that makes them survive.” If the author is right, then this production is heroic indeed. It is nontraditional only in the most superficial way. Under the skin, the flesh is warm, the blood pounds away and the bones are solid. How wonderful to see the masterpiece everyone was talking about.