ARTVOICE, 01/20/11
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
by Anthony Chase

I have never seen a less sentimental rendering of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof than the one currently on the stage of the Andrews Theatre, under the auspices of the Irish Classical Theatre Company. Greg Natale has delivered a smart and searing production, in which the conflicting desires of the characters collide in a shower of theatrical sparks.

Act One of this play about a family living with among the towering lies they tell themselves and each other always and forever must belong to Maggie the cat, played here with focus and restraint by Diane Curley. Indeed, Miss Curley does take possession of the first act here as she successfully delineates the battle lines of the entire play with nearly surgical precision. She needs her husband, Brick, to make love to her, with every connotation of the word “need.” She is a sexual woman who is being neglected; she loves this man who has turned on her and craves his affection and approval; and finally, she needs to conceive a child with him, or she runs the risk of being cut out of her father-in-law Big Daddy’s spectacularly rich estate. Curley never loses sight of this trajectory. She is a woman with a purpose.

Of the Maggies I have seen—Kathleen Turner, Mary Stuart Masterson, Buffalo’s Maureen Porter (in a co-production staged by BET and WIT at the old Irish Classical space on Chippewa), Cheryl Kenan (in the chaotically directed 1997 Studio Arena production best remembered for Ron L. Matthews, stripped to the waist as Brick), Anika Noni Rose (with an African-American cast featuring James Earl Jones as Big Daddy), and of course Elizabeth Taylor in the film—Curley’s performance most closely resembles Masterson’s in its calculating intelligence and well considered plotting.

By contrast, her husband, Brick, played by Neal Moeller, is a man in a willful fog. Brick does not care if he loses his inheritance. Blaming Maggie for the death of his best friend and resentful at her recognition of the homosexual dimension of that relationship, he has come to despise his wife’s very voice and presence. He tunes her out as best he can as he waits for the “click” indicating a state of peace that he knows will come from drinking enough whiskey. Moeller skillfully navigates this descent, and becomes so successfully opaque that we fully understand Big Daddy’s explosive frustration with him.

Dan Walker is a shrewd and unkind Big Daddy. This is a man awakening from what he believes was a temporary setback. He suspected that he was dying of cancer, and when the family lies, telling him that he has a clean bill of health, a lie told less as a kindness than as a strategy to buy time to maneuver for shares of his wealth, he reemerges like a monster waking from hibernation. The cruelty with which he hurls hateful abuse at Big Mama, the loyal wife he abhors, inspired laughter from the opening night audience that made me uncomfortable. What could they be laughing at? This man is a horror! (If I have one hesitation with the production, it is the modulation of the comic moments—Brick’s ineffectual but violent swing at Maggie, inspiring her retort, “Missed me!” fails to generate enough violence to earn a laugh.) And yet, in this Big Daddy, or more specifically in Walker’s performance, we see echoes of each of the other characters. We see Maggie’s desire to determine her fate. We see Brick coming to terms with the hand life has dealt him. We see the older son, Gooper, and his monstrously fertile wife, Mae, striving to earn all that Big Daddy possesses, if not his love or approval. If Act One belongs to Curley as Maggie, the second belongs to Walker as Big Daddy. From there, control splinters in all the best ways as Tennessee Williams takes us toward his satisfyingly unresolved conclusion.

The other performances in the mix are similarly fine. Sheila McCarthy walks the fragile balance between pathos and buffoonery with her Big Mama. She, perhaps most of all, is a reflection of the husband who does not love her—right down to her efforts to impersonate him and mimic his language when she realizes what Gooper and Meg are up to. The performance is achingly perfect.

Kelly Ferguson-Moore is delicious as the palpably dreadful Sister Woman, Meg. She waddles onto the stage in an absurd satin maternity dress (thank you, costume designer Dixon Reynolds) and smugly begins to take control. She is the Southern Gothic equivalent of Chekhov’s Natasha from Three Sisters, the selfish and unfeeling sister-in-law from hell, who bosses everyone and cares only about her own children. Ferguson-Moore’s performance is a highlight among many highlights. When Eric Rawski, as Gooper, turns to her and almost helplessly pleads, “You just won’t let me do this the nice way, will you?” simultaneously emphasizing his weakness and their joint ruthlessness, we feel both his pain and his sense of awe. Like Ferguson-Moore, Rawski successfully imbues an overtly comical character with reality and substance.

Doug Crane as the minister, Jim Maloy as Big Daddy’s physician, and Carol McGuire as Trixie, the only representative of Gooper and Meg’s brood of children, support the power and essence of the production.

I admired the set by Ron Schwartz, which makes excellent use of the circular Andrews Theatre stage, emphasizing the exposed permeability of Maggie and Brick’s bedroom, while handing director Natale an immediacy and intimacy that serves the production beautifully. Dixon Reynolds’ costumes evoke and highlight each character in this capable and entertaining production.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof continues through February 6 at the Andrews Theatre (625 Main Street/853-ICTC).

The Buffalo News, Jan. 21, 2011
3 and 1/2 stars

This 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' sizzles
Irish Classical Theatre does justice to Williams’ classic
By COLIN DABKOWSKI

It can be tempting, especially after the marathon run of family engagements that accompanies the holidays, to think that your relatives are uncommonly dramatic.So, it helps to be reminded that, however many highballs Uncle Jim puts down or how much your mother nags you about tying the knot, your family is probably a lot more normal than it seems.And that, among many other reasons, is why we have Tennessee Williams.Almost any scene from one of his greatest plays (“The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Summer and Smoke,” “The Rose Tattoo”) is guaranteed to blow your family’s Christmas dinner out of the water. Williams’ brand of family drama, tied up as it is with sex, death and a desperate longing for impossible things, has served as the inspiration for any number of plays in the “and you thought your family was weird” genre, from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County.”Perhaps Williams’ most compelling, beloved and breathlessly engrossing play, and his personal favorite, is “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The Irish Classical Theatre Company’s brisk, emotionally affecting and somewhat chilly production of the play opened Jan. 14 in the Andrews Theatre.The critic Kenneth Tynan memorably described the three-act drama as “a birthday party about death.”The action takes place on a Southern plantation, where members of an aristocratic family meet to argue over the family fortune. Patriarch Big Daddy (played with irresistible rancor by Dan Walker) is dying of cancer, unbeknown to him and to the wife he detests (the blustery Sheila McCarthy). His favored son, Brick (Neal Moeller in an excellent performance), has emptied his life of all hope for his own happiness and replaced it with alcohol, while Brick’s wife Maggie (Diane Curley) is desperate to pull him back into her heart and into their bed.Brick, who ambles around on crutches after a pathetic attempt to re-create the football glory of his youth, is broken up over the death of his best friend Skipper, who everybody insinuates was his lover. (“A true thing between two people is too rare to be normal,” Brick says about his friendship with Skipper.)And then there is Big Daddy’s other son, Gooper (Eric Rawski), and his wife Mae (Kelly Ferguson-Moore), whose disdain for Brick and Maggie is matched only by their desire to take control of the vast family estate.Williams, who wrote the play over 18 months, built each character as a receptacle for both our sympathy and our scorn. Plot devices that in any other play would seem unbelievable are used to achieve a perfect tension between love and disgust, greed and filial obligation and — as Williams himself once said — between the “conflicting desires of the flesh and the spirit.”

The brilliance of the play’s construction and its crackling dialogue, in order to have their full and devastating effect, have to be matched by the director and cast. For the most part, director Greg Natale and his actors deliver.

Moeller visibly seethes with disdain for everyone — including himself. It is a thrill to watch him go ego-to-ego with Walker’s Big Daddy, who spouts his own peculiar brand of disgust. But while Curley, as Maggie, does catty quite well, she refuses to allow even a spark of warmth or vulnerability through the veneer.

But with Natale’s keen attention to detail, the show’s natural pacing and the talents of the cast and production team, this “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is itself far too rare to be normal. And that’s reason enough to run out and see it right now.

Buffalo Rising, 01/18/11
Irish Classical Theatre's
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Neil Garvey

The Irish Classical Theatre Company's much anticipated production of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Tennessee Williams' masterpiece of  Southern dynastic succession, directed by Greg Natale, opened at the Andrews Theatre (Thursday, January 13).

Williams was the great poet among American playwrights. His language is truly beautiful, his phrases flowing and his dialogue can be hypnotic. He wastes no words, even when he is repetitious, (and he is, often). Each word has a deeper meaning, a coded context, a second or third layer guiding the actor and audience to the place where one sees the heart of the tragedy that drives the play.

Much of the symbolism is owing to the fact that most of the material simply was not directly addressed in the mid-nineteen fifties, and thus Williams, in subterfuge, was able to tear open taboo doors. In this regard, Williams was not merely poetic, but prophetic. Social issues barely whispered in mid-century America are now shouted out in an unending babel: "don't ask, don't tell",  spousal abuse (both physical and verbal,)  marital infidelity and women's liberation (sexual and economic), and not least, the inevitable corruption that comes with the concentration of great wealth.

Williams topics must have shocked his contemporary theatre audiences, and if one sees the sanitized 1958 film version of CAT, starring Burl Ives, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor,  one sees clear evidence that the most challenging aspects of the play were left out, or were so watered down as to be meaningless.

The film, nevertheless, had heart. And, at least for viewers of a certain age,  the performances of the movie stars set the standard, for better or worse, for all subsequent productions.  Burl Ives gave a stomping, trumpeting performance. He was rotund, bellicose and offensive, but Ives' Big Daddy ultimately revealed the vital sense of loss, defeat and disappointment upon which the play sinks or swims.

The ICTC cast is a study in contrast with the past. Actor Dan Walker is big too, but in a vertical, not a horizontal sense. If Ives was the classic charging pachyderm, Walker is the roaring lion. Lithe and muscular, Walker prowls  the stage, playing with his prey, batting them senseless before delivering the coup de grace. This is not your daddy's Big Daddy.

Walker's is an impressive performance, one can easily believe that this is a man who clawed his way to the top. While Big Daddy may pay lip-service to the niceties, even the necessities of social "mendacity" --- Church going, marital bliss, the blessing of grandchildren (I had a neighbor once who muttered that grandchildren were "highly over-rated ") ---  this Big Daddy is driven solely by self-interest.

An unfortunate by-product of this lionesque portrayal is that one is hard-pressed to believe that Big Daddy is really suffering from a terminal illness, the occasional groans and side-grabbing do not conceal the fact that on his worst day, Mr. Walker does not look like a guy who is about to keel over, and Big Daddy's  impending death is the big tent for this circus.

That aside, here is an eminently watchable and engaging performance, strong, lucid and certainly unique.  

All the performances are highly charged and well executed.  Some choices made in this production aim the characters in a direction not quite charted in the text. Ms. Diane Curley as Maggie the Cat, for example,  is lovely to behold, sensual and calculating, she is the ultimate survivor. Born of genteel circumstances, she has become a chameleon, one-part charming southern belle, one part vamp as she tries to coax her inebriated husband out of his stupor and into the battle for Big Daddy's estate.  

Williams has created a pantheon of leading ladies, providing some of the richest roles in American Theatre. Maggie is outstanding not only as a harbinger of women's rights to come, marital, political and economic, but as a blatantly sexual being. Ms. Curley's Maggie is cunning and self-assured, her sexual prowess is far more a means to an end than reflective of any biological need. Williams certainly meant his cat on a hot tin roof to be a cat in heat, literally.  In that, I think, at least on opening night, this Maggie misses the pure animal lust which sets her apart, and, in part, drives her ambition and the ultimate tragedy of the play. Nevertheless, this is a thinking Maggie the Cat, one who delivers the goods and lands on her feet.

Neal Moeller, as Brick,  plays a very good drunk. You know the type, cool and steady even in the midst of the most astounding binge. Brick is in a bubble, numbing the pain of his shame, which is a mix of sexual guilt, betrayal, abandonment and his lost youth. The love that dare not speak its name really did not speak its name in the mid 1950's, but Williams comes mighty close. (Was the word "queer"  ever used  in a major American play up to that time?) Moeller's Brick is so insular, it is startling when he pops out for a fleeting humane moment.

The role of Brick offers one of the most challenging in modern drama. Brick maintains an outwardly calm surface while the most soul- wrenching memories burn inside. This dynamic can create barriers for one's fellow actors on stage. How does one relate to someone who refuses to relate?  Moeller's Brick does connect, however, when it counts, and it is especially apparent in the Act II confrontation with Big Daddy.

If you would like to see an actor totally, 100% "all-in" committed to her role, come see Sheila McCarthy as Big Mama. Better known for her accomplishments in musical theatre, Ms. McCarthy blows on stage like a gulf hurricane. This Big Mama commands your attention. She bellows and cajoles and hoots. Her emotions erupt in unending rivers of speech.  The comedy is high, but so too is the drama.

Tennessee Williams is like Shakespeare in that, every time I see one of his plays, I see some new aspect I had never caught before. Big Mama's whole world revolves around Big Daddy and her family.  In Ms. McCarthy's performance, for the first time, I noticed an individual in Big Mama, someone I had yet to see.

Big Daddy's about to die without ever having made a will. This "oversight" drives the play, as stakeholders plot to wrest control of the plantation in a post-Big Daddy world. At one point, after she discovers the truth about Big Daddy's condition, Big Mama rejects her son Gooper's designs on the estate, and, as she sets the record straight, she speaks forcefully as "Big Daddy's talkin'." She literally talks as Big Daddy. Coupled with Big Daddy's accusation that Big Mama was already trying to control matters, it occurred to me then that if Big Daddy dies intestate, it will be Big Mama who, as the widow, will take the lion's share, if not all of the estate.

Abused and ignored, McCarthy's Big Mama reveals a just slightly veiled perception that, as things stand, she will have the last word. Thought to be a fool by almost everyone, Big Mama here is nobody's fool. Terrific job.

Also terrific in tough roles, are Kelly Ferguson-Moore as daughter-in-law Mae and Eric Rawski as the hapless son, Gooper. It has been suggested that these characters suffer the worst as the butt of Williams' social satire. Mae is a clucking hen, wrangling her brood and brooding over her turf. Rawski's Gooper looks for all the world like a Glenn Beck wannabe, with a matching talent for double talk.  Both actors succeed in creating mutli-dimensional individuals who, in concert, offer the perfect portrait of the "mendacity" so central to the play's success.

Doug Crane and Jim Maloy round things out nicely as the avaricious Reverend Tooker and the venerable Doctor Baugh.  And not least, a special mention for Carol McGuire, who portrayed the granddaughter Trixie. Miss McGuire was a delight every time she took to the stage, and provided a much needed breath of fresh air in an otherwise sultry Mississippi evening.  

This is an excellent production, it moves deliberately and forcefully. Williams' language gets a good work-out here.

This production is helped enormously by the excellent technical support. The set, designed by Ron Schwartz is impressive. At first glance I thought the huge bedroom suite resembled nothing so much as a Pharaoh's tomb, ornate but quite lifeless, with everything a Delta King would need in the afterlife, and thus much in keeping with the biblical overtones inherent in the play.

The music, and sound effects by Tom Makar strike the perfect chords for this tropical, languid and decaying world. And Brian Cavanagh's lighting also adds the perfect mood. The costumes, by Dixon Reynolds, are rich and Hair & Make-up designer Susan Drozd does an impeccable job achieving the look of the Eisenhower era.  

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF,  directed by ICTC Associate Director Greg  Natale, through February 6, 2011.

Rocket Man for Jan. 20, 2011
‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’
- Doug Smith