first night review: Cat On a Hot Tin Roof @ the marquette theatre

Photo: James Kelley

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Review by Dorian Hatchett

​Even in the decadence and grandeur of the monied American South, people are predisposed to being ugly to each other when they are confronted with their own mortality. We can add 'kindness' to the list of things that money can’t buy in that old trope, as no one acts anything but vulgar when a mirror is held up to their shortcomings- especially when the person holding it is someone with equally egregious flaws.  

Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1955) was Tennessee Williams' favorite of his plays. There are so many themes at work in the dialogue, that there is some viscerally ugly truth for everyone to find and hold dear in the secret places they hope others might never see.  

From the lies we casually tell ourselves and each other (the mendacity!) to get through the day, to the fact that greed is never more present than in the impending death of family, social webs are structures we are all caught in, no matter our socioeconomic station. In the mortality of patriarchs and power imbalances that can make monsters of us all, we scrape our way through life, trying our best to just exist in our own contexts, rather than the frames and figures built around us by family and acquaintance.  

The set designer (Nathan Arthur) has created a tiny universe in discordant angles, giving a feeling of expanse on a small stage. The lights go up on a bedroom in a plantation home; a place which should be opulent and comforting but instead is a high-traffic nightmare in a family that seems clinically incapable of maintaining even the most basic of boundaries.  

Maggie, or “Maggie the Cat” as she is repeatedly referred to, (Rebecca Elizabeth Hollingsworth) is a society woman, married into wealth like chattel, and struggling with her failure to produce an heir in a culture that places her only value in the products of her uterus. She wields sex like a weapon, striking out at anyone in range, and especially her alcoholic, narcissistic husband Brick (Brandon Kotfila).  Brick is drinking on a mission: to feel nothing, but this entire family is full of too many feelings and opinions, and insists on bringing them to his private room, when he refuses to join them in the greater estate.  

Big Daddy (Randy Cheramie) is a force to be reckoned with in his fiefdom of cotton, and he won’t let a little thing like dying of cancer stop him from wrenching every last bit of misery from his heirs’ attentions to his (most likely final) birthday. Those heirs, of course, are motivated by familial obligation and asset acquisition, rather than genuine emotional bonds in a family where money has replaced any real human connection.  

Big Daddy has two sons, the aforementioned nihilist Brick, who he idealizes as his perfect heir, and Gooper (Andrew Neiman) who sought to impress his father by becoming him, and who has only earned his ire in return. Together with their machiavellian wives, Maggie the Cat and Mae (played by the always fantastic Monica R. Harris) tempers coalesce and secrets and lies are confronted head on in a single evening of explosive family drama.  

Finally, after a lifetime of mendacity, everyone is forced to confront their foibles and shortcomings right there in Brick and Maggie’s gauzy palace of a bedroom. Add in Big Mama (Margeaux Fanning) in her simultaneous high-strung and delicate sensibilities and Gooper and Mae’s flock of five unruly children (Those No-Neck Monsters!) and this recipe is all set to boil over in a way that would be so much schadenfreude if it weren't too real for comfort.
 
No one is entirely unsympathetic. The flipside of the misery is the sacrifice of soul each person has made to live in such a society. Whether it is shame and grief, or loneliness and desperation that drives a character's unkindness, or an odd, discordant note of kinship and tolerance from a normally callous cardinal, we all exist in shades of gray in the world of Tennessee Williams.  

In its tenth season, Tennessee Williams Theatre Company presents Cat On a Hot Tin Roof at the Marquette Theatre at Loyola University, through July 27th.  Click here for information and ticketing

---

Sign up for your free, weekly, curated guide to arts and culture in New Orleans: 
​