Past Reviews

Regional Reviews: Seattle

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Shows Its Age
ACT Theatre

Also see David's review of Angry Housewives


John Aylward
Neither a 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Drama nor its author's 1974 rewrites and excisions keep ACT Theatre's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams from seeming to have been declawed and diminished over the years. Director Kurt Beattie's decision to cast the talented Laura Griffith and Brandon O'Neill, as the pivotal pair Maggie and Brick, seems as wrong-headed as the same duo's casting as much different lovers Julie and Billy in 5th Avenue's Carousel. The best thing about Cat has always seemed to be the roles of Brick's bigger than life Big Daddy and Big Mama, snide sister-in law Mae and Dullard brother Gooper. These roles, and the actors who embody them in Beattie's sometimes rambling and tedious staging, are the main draw of this particular production.

The family of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon who has just been diagnosed (unbeknownst at the outset to the patriarch and his missus) with likely terminal cancer, gather to celebrate his birthday and bring the family's dirty laundry, particularly that of Brick's grieving over the suicide of his beloved (and then some) football player crony Skipper. Maggie is bound and determined that Brick's brother Gooper and chronically pregnant biddy of a wife Mae will not end up as principal heirs to the estate. Big Daddy clearly favors Brick, but wants to see him bounce back from his alcoholism and malaise, and father a child with Maggie, having no fondness for Mae and Gooper's "no-neck monsters." When the truth about the cancer is revealed, the vulture-like Mae and Gooper are all but ready to divide the estate then and there, but Maggie and Big Daddy show their mettle and determination in the final scenes.

John Aylward as Big Daddy is a deliciously cantankerous tower of power dominating the production, and able to spark off both Griffith and especially O'Neill in their scenes together. Marianne Owen as Big Mama is a weepy but wise Southern matriarch with a reserve of steel in her backbone who has weathered her stormy life with Big Daddy. Morgan Rowe's Mae is less a Steel Magnolia than a Venus flytrap, capable of emasculating her weak-willed husband Gooper, subtly underplayed by Charles Leggett, as a man as empty as his suits are expensive. I kept wishing I were seeing O'Neill in a richer Williams role, like Stanley Kowalski or the Gentleman Caller, and Griffith might scorch the stage as Catherine in the playwright's Suddenly, Last Summer which her best moments here hint at. I must add that the young actors playing Mae and Gooper's kiddies (Kyle Ballard, Kai Borch, Annika Carlson, and Nina Makino) do an admirable job of playing the odious, Mama-trained brats that they hopefully bear no resemblance to off-stage.

Staging this show in the challenging in-the-round Allen Theatre might have worked with a more suggestive scenic design, but Carey Wong didn't manage to achieve the separation between Maggie and Brick's bedroom and the gallery where the whole family gathers. Mary Louise Geiger's lighting design is admirable, and Melanie Taylor Burgess' costumes embody the era and the locale.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof runs through May 17, 2015, at ACT Theatre, 700 Union Street, downtown Seattle. For tickets and additional info go to the ACT website at www.acttheatre.org.


Photo: Chris Bennion

- David Edward Hughes