Joe Rosario

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Last summer the Ruth Stage production of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre at St. Clement’s. The critical responses were uniformly mixed-to-negative, and OffOffOnline’s Charles Wright described it as a “lumbering version” of the play under Joe Rosario’s direction. Now in a “re-engagement,” as the publicity materials describe the current iteration, the production has been substantially recast, and there are a few directorial modifications. While this Cat 2.0 still lumbers, there is a noticeable improvement along with glimmers of fresh insight into the mendacious, caustic, and fiercely combative characters who populate Williams’s Mississippi Delta estate.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features roles that are (pardon the expression) catnip to adventurous actors. This land mine of a play premiered in 1955, a year that, in retrospect, seems the apex of Williams’s success. The playwright’s career took off with The Glass Menagerie in 1945, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, and continued for 28 years after Cat, until his death in 1983. During a long literary decline, he wrote a number of lesser, though admirable, plays, but even the best of those don’t measure up to his depiction of the Pollitts, a clan of nouveau riche Southern strivers squabbling over “twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.”

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