CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Though it fits any play, “mendacity” is an especially apt term for this 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with its delicious deceit, may be a perfect embodiment of theater as “the lie that tells the truth.” It’s Williams’s shrewd powers of illusion that make us want so much to see the Pollitts’ lies exposed–whatever the characters do to each other is nothing compared to the subterfuge the playwright forces on the audience.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You know the story: a greedy, manipulative Southern Gothic clan gets all the more so when its patriarch, Big Daddy, who’s dying of cancer, refuses to draw up a will. Gooper, Big Daddy’s hypocritical elder son, is desperate to be able to provide for the five “no-neck monsters” spawned by him and his wife Mae (who now carries a sixth). His rapacious rival is Maggie, the title’s predatory “cat” and the childless wife of Brick, Big Daddy’s favorite son, a withdrawn, alcoholic ex-football hero whose painfully repressed homosexuality is eating him alive. (Williams doesn’t let a single character say the H word. But then even in his letters Williams would self-deprecatingly describe his straight friends as “normal.”)
The six-person ensemble gets across both the desperation of trapped souls and Williams’s compassion for life’s losers right from the start. Adrianne Cury’s flamboyantly sultry tigress Maggie is a sad anomaly, an earth mother who can’t give birth, a woman who can’t show her love for Brick in the only way she knows. (It’s clear that whatever fortune Maggie gets from providing an heir is nothing to the security she’ll get if she can make Brick forget Skipper.) It’s easy to convey Maggie’s sexual machinations, but Cury drives home the hunger in her that’s as strong as the sex.
