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ACT's 'Cat' sizzles with great actors on a hot roof
Oakland Tribune, Oct 21, 2005 by Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER
FIFTY YEARS after its premiere, Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" still smolders with sexual desire and rages ferociously against a world filled with mendacity, a "five-dollar" word, as Williams puts it, that means "lies and liars."
American Conservatory Theater's production of "Cat," which opened Wednesday at San Francisco's Geary Theater, hits all the right marks, even if some of the finer details aren't what they could be.
Director Israel Hicks wisely chooses to use Williams' 1974 version of the script in which he restored cuts and resharpened edges blunted for the original 1955 Broadway production.
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If you've only ever seen the 1958 movie version with Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives, you really should see the play to feel the full force of Williams' drama. Both the original Broadway script and especially the movie are softer, more sanitized versions of a story that involves homosexuality, lust and greed in equal measure and the brutal lies we tell ourselves and each other as a means of survival.
Told in three acts in about three hours, "Cat" is filled with the kind of language Williams was known for: earthy and direct but filled with an almost musical rhythm and dazzling range of colors.
Act 1 looks like a duet, but it's really more of a monologue by Maggie (a sexy Rene Augesen) as she attempts to seduce her emotionally distant husband Brick (Michael James Reed).
Augesen is marvelous as Maggie uses every trick she knows -- feminine wiles, brutal honesty, physical exertion -- to capture her husband's attention. With Maggie running around in her slip and Brick in his boxer shorts, there's a threat of sexual tension, but Brick is far more interested in his ever-present cocktail than he is in Maggie.
With Act 2 comes the arrival of Big Daddy (Jack Willis), whose 65th birthday is being celebrated in other parts of the big Southern plantation mansion (lovely set by Ralph Funicello).
Tough-talking and eager to bond with his troubled son, Big Daddy corners Brick, and the two struggle through an awkward conversation in which the father demands to know why the son has thrown away his promising life.
Bigger than life and full of rough Southern charm, Willis' deeply felt Big Daddy is at once a domineering patriarch and a sensitive soul who feels he has a new lease on life. As Maggie describes him, he "hasn't turned gentleman farmer -- he's still a Mississippi redneck."
Big Daddy knows that Brick began drinking when his best friend Skipper died. He also knows that Brick and Skipper had something between them that was more than friendship.
Even though Big Daddy swears he is a man of tolerance, Brick can't say exactly what it was between him and Skipper other than the one "great, good, true thing in my life."
Williams never gets much more specific than that, but by Act 3, the play has become about something more than Brick's reason for drinking.
Big Daddy's birthday celebration is interrupted by a sudden storm -- both outside and in. It seems that Big Daddy's health has become an issue, so Brick's older brother Gooper (Rod Gnapp), his wife Mae (the wonderfully annoying Anne Darragh) and their five little "no- neck monsters" are circling like sharks, anxious to get their grubby paws on Big Daddy's estate.
Adding to the hysteria is Big Mama (Katherine McGrath), a spoiled woman to whom appearances are more important than the truth. McGrath gives an honest, always interesting performance, but her character is constantly referred to and joked about as fat, but that's one thing the actress is not.
The cast, which also includes Julian Lopez-Morillas as a mealy- mouthed preacher and James Carpenter as a doctor, is first-rate under Hicks' assured, straightforward direction.
Only Reed as Brick is problematic, which isn't that surprising given that the character of Brick is inherently problematic. Something of a cipher around which much of the play revolves, Brick is defined as having the "charm of the defeated," but Reed seems merely defeated.
He comes to life only in his scene with Willis' Big Daddy. The rest of the time he fails to make much of an impression. Brick keeps waiting for the alcohol he continuously consumes to give him "the click," that moment when real life turns off. And we keep waiting for Reed's performance to click, but it never really does.
That could be a big problem, but the other actors and the play itself pull a hefty amount of weight. This "Cat" dances nimbly across Williams' hot tin roof and lands squarely on fertile dramatic ground.
You can e-mail Chad Jones at cjones@angnewspapers.com or call (925) 416-4853.
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