Sonoya Mizuno as Maggie the Cat and Matt de Rogatis as her husband, Brick Pollitt, in the final scene of the Ruth Stage presentation of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 drama 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 landmine 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 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.”
Cat has been back to Broadway five times in the 66 years since Elia Kazan’s original production closed. However, the current Ruth Stage revival is the first professional New York production that Williams’s literary estate has permitted Off-Broadway. Director Joe Rosario’s staging affirms the enduring power of the play, which is not to say that this lumbering version does it justice.
Big Mama (Alison Fraser) helps Big Daddy (Christian Jules Le Blanc) prepare for his birthday festivities. Photographs by Miles Skalli.
Cat is the most naturalistic of Williams’s major dramas. Its prevailing theme—deception, especially humanity’s susceptibility to self-deception—is timely in this era of “alternative facts” and the Big Lie. Brick Pollitt (Matt de Rogatis) and his father, Big Daddy (Christian Jules Le Blanc), in their monumental Act II confrontation, keep repeating the word “mendacity,” and the older man ends the act by denouncing his relatives, physician, and pastor as “all lying dying liars!”
Williams gives us three or so hours of the Pollitts’ complicated family life in real time (with two intermissions for cast and audience to catch their breath). His hard-driving dialogue is piquant but skirts the Southern gothic excess of later efforts such as Orpheus Descending and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More. In Cat, he’s writing in the most securely realistic mode of his career, giving the characters distinct yet believable voices.
At the beginning of Cat, Maggie (Sonoya Mizuno) has a series of complicated speeches, which she intones to her taciturn, alcoholic husband Brick, played with imposing impassivity by the near naked, extravagantly tattooed de Rogatis. Maggie’s speeches are a New York City Marathon of acting. They lay out the social background of the story, the dysfunctional relationships among Maggie’s in-laws, and the fragile state of her marriage (haunted by the specter of Skipper, Brick’s late best friend). These monologues are pure exposition and last, in the aggregate, more than 30 minutes; but, as Gore Vidal observed, when Williams “is plugged into the right character, the wrong word never sounds.”
“Big Daddy is the self-made monarch of an agricultural kingdom.”
Mizuno, formerly a dancer with the English National Ballet, lends grace and concerted feline physicality to the part, though without the vocal agility the material requires. Her Maggie is frequently shrill, with limited tonal variation. She’s not alone in being overtaxed by her role; but, to be fair, the 10-member cast has to wage an uphill battle against the acoustics, uneven amplification, and noisy ventilation (or perhaps air conditioning) of the Theatre at St. Clement’s. Alison Fraser, as Big Mama, delivers the evening’s most striking performance, noteworthy for a moment of horrifying self-delusion in which her previously dithering character halts all movement on stage, demanding that everyone disbelieve what’s plainly happening to the family.
Brick and Big Daddy discover their mutual disdain for mendacity and “lying dying liars” in the monumental father-son scene in the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Big Daddy is the self-made monarch of an agricultural kingdom in the Mississippi Delta. For his 65th-birthday festivities, elder son Gooper (Spencer Scott) and daughter-in-law Mae (Tiffan Borelli), in complicity with the family doctor (Jim Kempner), have told Big Daddy—falsely—that his health is sound except for “a spastic colon.” The truth is that Big Daddy is in a late stage of cancer. As Maggie says, “This is Big Daddy’s last birthday.” Knowing he hasn’t made a will, Gooper and Mae are in a stir about who will inherit the plantation. As Maggie explains to Brick, “[T]his campaign’s afoot to impress [Big Daddy], forcibly as possible, with the fact that you drink and I’ve borne no children.”
Williams filled Cat with colorful references to the 1950s; yet Rosario’s version, with modernistic set designed by Matthew Imhoff and no updates in the text, supposedly takes place in the present. Ben Levine’s ominous musical underscoring (more Streetcar than Cat) defies the author’s decision to make this play, by and large, realistic. Whatever missteps, though, this Cat is a well-timed call to reflect on insights for our day from the incomparable playwright whom Vidal fittingly dubbed The Glorious Bird.
The Ruth Stage production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof runs at The Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 W. 46th St.) through Aug. 14. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit ruthstage.org/cat or telecharge.com.
