THERE are more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with revisions. But ever since its first Broadway outing in 1955 – under the often heavy hand of Elia Kazan – Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” has been a movable feast, with at least four slightly revised, authorized texts.
In the version that opened last night – barely five years after the last Broadway outing – that naughty four-letter word is in, but Big Daddy never tells his dirty joke about the elephant.
More obvious is the fact that this is the first all-black “Cat.” What happened to colorblind casting?
Well, in fairness, while that works in Shakespeare, it can present difficulties in plays as time- and space-specific as “Cat,” difficulties even an all-black cast can’t quite surmount. No matter.
Director Debbie Allen and her producers have assembled a stellar cast, notably James Earl Jones as the cancer-wracked patriarch, Big Daddy, in a portrayal of bluster and subtlety that will surely leave a permanent mark on a role he both inhabits and embodies.
And Jones is simply the first among an exceptional cast, including Anika Noni Rose as Maggie, the roof-clinging cat lady; Terrence Howard as Brick, her alcoholic and self-closeted husband; Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama, Big Daddy’s wife; and Giancarlo Esposito in the much smaller but significant role of Brick’s older brother, the mean and nerdy Gooper.
The story of a rich Southern family in a time of crisis and an atmosphere fraught with what Brick and Big Daddy call “mendacity” has the pungent smell of decaying magnolias.
Williams – anxious for the mood and essence of this play, set a little south of Chekhov, to survive as powerfully as he felt it – wrote a long and startling stage direction.
It’s about 250 words long, and in part it reads: “I’m trying to capture the true quality of experience, that cloudy, flickering evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.”
He urges his actors (and us) to try to escape “facile definitions that make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.”
A telling phrase, “a snare for the truth.” Ironically, that’s the essence of this, perhaps his most truthful play: the lies we tell other people and ourselves, the lies we live and die by, the truths we evade and ignore.
Apart from Jones’ masterly Big Daddy, the other performances, guided by Allen’s unshowy direction, are also all essays in truth, mendacity and consequences.
Rose’s sexy yet poignant Maggie beautifully delineates love and desire against a pragmatic awareness of poverty. At the same time, Howard’s low-key, high-tension Brick, waiting for the click of drunkenness to get him through another day of denial, and Rashad’s broken yet defiant Big Mama – her face a barometer of a family’s pain – fuse into one picture.
I’ve seen smoother stagings of the play, but this one is well worth seeing. It has satisfying power and little or any “mendacity.”
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
The Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St.; (212) 239-6200.