CAST ON A HOT TIN ROOF
And now there’s a new slant to Chicago’s most popular form of group comedy—literary parody. The Free Associates, students of the Second City Training Center, the Improv Institute, Boston’s Angry Tuxedos, and ComedySportz, devote the first half of their Thursday-night offering, Cast on a Hot Tin Roof, to a one-act improvisation in the style of Tennessee Williams.
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Certainly Williams is fair game—as anyone who saw the Illegitimate Players’ superb The Glass Mendacity knows. Williams’s dramas are deliciously vulnerable, all the more so if you love them. With their heavy-handed symbol mongering, rhapsodic mad scenes, death-haunted nervous breakdowns, and melodramatic overwriting, they’re tempting to take over the top. Subtlety is wasted on Williams.
Considering the target, Blanket Full of Anger ended on an uncharacteristically happy note—without a single act of cannibalism or even a hint of a commitment proceeding.
The chief strength of Cast on a Hot Tin Roof (apart from the terrific title) is how well the Free Associates know their Williams. Though the troupe is just six months old, it pillages his plays—26 are listed in the program—as thoroughly as professional thieves strip a car. v
