“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opens with mismatched lovers Maggie and Brick standing at the edge of a cliff, with nowhere to go but down.
But a compelling new staging at the Aurora Fox shows just how far a freefall can fall.
It’s on the cusp of the civil-rights era, and 1950s Southern aristocracy is crumbling – personified in the decaying, horrid Pollitt family, a clan wallowing in mendacity, hypocrisy and pretense.
It’s Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s 65th birthday, but this is no party – more like a Mississippi mud-slinging. His nasty progeny are jockeying for inheritance position. He favors drunken ex-jock son Brick, but Gooper and his viperous wife Mae have five kids – and thus, the inside track.
There’s a big, unspoken skeleton in the family closet concerning Maggie’s failure to produce a child. That would take some doing, as boozing Brick gave up bedding her after best friend Skipper’s suicide. Whatever these two men shared, it was intense and short-lived – and its aftershocks have catapulted Brick into a shame spiral that has him slugging whiskey until that nightly “click” in his head that allows him to stop feeling.
The Vintage Theatre just staged “Cat” using the 1956 Broadway script, still the most commonly produced. That version incorporated many changes director Elia Kazan insisted on – not all of which Williams agreed with, but did agree to.
Young Aurora Fox director Brenda Cook is using Williams’ revised 1974 Broadway revival script (which she’s further pared from 13 characters to eight). Scholars say there’s a lot less Kazan and a lot more Williams in the 1974 Brick, more directly reflecting the writer’s own lifelong struggle with his sexuality and addictions.
The Aurora staging is most notable for its uniformly strong and tantalizingly debatable performances.
The impeccable Jack Casperson’s hard and hateful Big Daddy is a cauldron of redneck vituperativeness. He’s a horrible old hick with a $10 million bank account. Maggie and Brick don’t get better to look at than the scantily clad Rebecca Gibel and the half-naked Chris Reid.
Reid’s hollow, harrowing Brick, who shifts from stoic to stormy in a snap, will launch many interpretative rehashes. They call Maggie “The Cat,” but no one’s more evasive than Brick. And Skipper is the crack in his wall of composure.
That Brick is latently homosexual is evident to all but Brick, whose insistence that Skipper was “the one great and good thing” in his life has left him petrified of its inference; Maggie seething with post-mortem jealousy. The possibility he might be gay is not something Brick can ever entertain in his world, so of course it now dominates every drunken day of it.
The play begins and ends on Gibel’s shoulders, and though she’s too young and unspoiled to maximize Maggie’s pathos and sad comedy, Gibel’s performance announces the arrival of a promising dramatic leading lady. As cats go, Gibel is a Persian in heat. She’s gorgeous and sultry, effectively conveying the sexual frustration of a trophy wife with no identity beyond an uninterested husband.
There’s more depth to be mined in Maggie – more emotional variance, more moments of savagery. But there’s nothing sadder than when Gibel’s Maggie says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living alone – if the one you love doesn’t love you.”
The great Judy Phelan-Hill is a dutifully helpless Big Mama, and Lisa Mumpton stands out as a particularly deleterious Mae. Austin Heim’s set is striking, though I’m not sure I understand the physical layout of his rooms. And while you are immediately struck by the set’s expansiveness, revealing moody backlighting at dusk, that openness contradicts the play’s most famous line, Maggie’s “We occupy the same cage.” No one seems all that trapped in this environ.
If you go, take a tip and sit in the balcony. The main floor at the Fox has terrible sightlines; this may be the only theater in town with better views from above.
If you are a “Cat” aficionado, the main script differences are evident in the final scene. (Spoiler warning.) Most heartbreaking is the “new” last line. Maggie has lied to Big Daddy that she’s pregnant. Now determined to make the lie true, she beds her now submissive husband, confessing she still loves poor, weak Brick. But now he delivers the devastating last word: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that were true?”
Whether these two conceive this night is no matter. Child or not, they are stuck with one another in this cage from which there is no release.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
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| “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
DRAMA|Aurora Fox, 9900 E. Colfax Ave.|Written by Tennessee Williams|Directed by Brenda Cook|Starring Jack Casperson, Rebecca Gibel, Chris Reid and Judy Phelan-Hill|THROUGH MAY 13|Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. some Sundays|2 hours, 40 minutes|$20-$24|303-739-1970, aurorafox.org
