Cat On A Hot Tin Roof At Lyric Stage

By Tennessee Williams

Directed By Scott Edmiston

Set by Janie E. Howland

Lighting by Karen Perlow

Cast:

Maggie the Cat, Georgia Lyman

Brick, Kelby T. Akin

Big Daddy, Spiro Veloudos 

Big Mama, Cheryl McMahon

Gooper, Owen Doyle

Mae, Elisa MacDonald

At The Lyric Stage Company

YWCA Building, Stuart Street and Clarendon Avenue

Boston, MA

February 13- March 14

Running time: 2 hrs and 45 minutes with two intermissions.

http://lyricstage.com

Sometimes, even in our time of profound cynicism, a show is just very good, even excellent without any qualifiers. This is the case with the current production of Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Cat on A Hot Tin Roof at Boston's Lyric Stage Company. There are no weaknesses in this show. Each role is played superbly. The set is just right, and the staging, the direction, are both skillful and elegant. 

Set at the 65th birthday of Big Daddy, the Pollitt family comes together to celebrate triumphant life and wealth while anticipating his impending death. Here is a strange rather disfunctional intimacy. The Lyric Stage Company theatre is itself an intimate setting. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an expansively intimate play. Intimacy on many levels is a major theme of the play. Maggie the Cat  (played strikingly and powerfully by Georgia Lyman) is profoundly troubled by the lack of intimacy with her seemingly stud of a husband, a physical rather than verbal Brick (played tersely and broodingly muscular by Kelby T. Akin). Ms. Lyman brings heat to her role.

The toy gun wielding no-neck monsters, the large brood of children (Maggie refers to them as a litter) of Brick's forever seeking brother and perpetually pregnant sister-in-law, Gooper and Mae, are a focus of Maggie's lack of parental fulfillment and sexual satisfaction. Patriarch Big Daddy played with a measured strength, caustic vulgarity and perspiring bravado by the Lyric's artistic director Spiro Veloudos, is a force that both glues and rips apart the family. While Brick drinks himself into a state of unfeeling, Big Daddy's wealth and power are greedily desired by Gooper and Mae who float around him like moths attracted to a flame. Cheryl McMahon's Big Mama is a female court jester figure and a bit of a Greek chorus rolled into one, a 50's frustrated wife.

Perhaps, Brick's disconnect with life, his lack of husbandly interest to his wife, and anomie are caused by  feelings of masculine inadequacy, never achieving stardom beyond football days at his alma mater, Old Miss? Or, and perhaps more telling is his shutdown of emotion when his best friend dies from drink and drugs? Here, the suggestion of another type of masculine intimacy is strong, the love not until then spoken of--homosexuality. This is coupled with Williams' personally heavy misogynist attitude. Williams did not seem to like women very much especially strong ones like Maggie or weaker ones like Big Mama. Brick appears to loathe Maggie while Big Daddy is full of contempt for his long suffering wife.

A major term used in the show is the word "mendacity." Mendacity refers to deception, falsehood, or divergence from the absolute truth. Both Big Daddy and Brick are very sensitive to and abhor mendacity. Some mendacity is portrayed by various characters--Big Mama, Gooper and Mae. Deception and falsehood are a twin headed monster in the play's narrative.

Starting early in his life as a story-teller and writer, the multi-award winning, Gothic playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was a true son of the South. Like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his works all have a regional connection. This play began as a short story published in The New Yorker about a fallen, conflicted former football star, Brick Pollitt. Williams and the director Elia Kazan developed it into a play.

Cat on a Hot Tim Roof has been performed and reprised over the years. Maggie has been played by a long list of major actresses including Barbara Bel Geddes, Elizabeth Taylor (in a lighter movie adaption in 1958),  Elizabeth Ashley, Kathleen Turner and others. 

The character of Big Daddy describes a rags to riches up from the land approach to wealth and power. The character's physical size actually underscores this. The Mississippi Delta estate suggests the fecund nature of the land and the family while the references to the Nile Delta and Maggie the (sacred) Cat suggest a mysterious Egyptian sense of dynasty and afterlife. Like a flooded delta, Big Daddy's illness diminishes him as squabbles erode his family. The Delta moon glows with warmth or fades by shadows.

This Lyric Stage Company production is a show that should not be missed.