Love and Disaster.(Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)(Theater review)

The real star of the latest production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof " (at the Broadhurst, directed by Debbie Allen) is the play itself. Listening to Tennessee Williams's rare poetry, which grounds his characters' lush speech in the exaggeratedly colloquial, is made all the more delectable by his witchy, fine-fanged humor--and his compassion. The play was first produced on Broadway in 1955, and went on to win that year's Pulitzer Prize. During the show's nearly three-hour running time, one is alert less to the action--which is relatively minimal--than to the various aesthetic tightropes that Williams walks, the most obvious being his skillful balance of melodrama and artistry. At times, you can feel him reaching so high to incorporate into his work both a spiritual and a carnal longing for love that you fear he'll topple over. But "Cat" keeps righting itself, largely because the hysteria that propels it--it's a play about painful recrimination, and lies that are reversed in the face of the brutal truth--is tempered by Williams's command of his craft. He loves the way his characters talk, but he loves their silences, too.

"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof " grew out of a short story titled "Three Players of a Summer Game," which the author published in this magazine in 1952. That story, about an adolescent boy's romantic awakening, centered on four main characters, only two of whom made it to the boards: Brick Pollitt and his wife, Margaret. In the play, Brick (Terrence Howard, making his stage and Broadway debuts) calls his wife Maggie; she calls herself Maggie the Cat. Her feline qualities, like her self-interest, are hard to miss--she's coyly flirtatious with Brick's father, Big Daddy (James Earl Jones), the family patriarch and wealthy plantation owner, and she's skittish around Brick, who rejects her sexually. Not that Maggie (Anika Noni Rose) blames him, not much: sometime before the action begins, Maggie slept with Brick's unstable buddy, Skipper, in order to break up the close friendship between the two men and win back her husband's attentions. Now Maggie thinks it's time that she and Brick got over the affair--she wants a child, and to become a legitimate member of the Pollitt clan. But Brick can't move on. Soon after Maggie slept with Skipper, and Brick rebuffed his attempts to confess, Skipper more or less drank himself to death. Brick can't live with the guilt--or with Maggie.

Despite her relative emotional ruthlessness, Maggie's a conventional girl at heart. She loves Brick, though perhaps she loves his princelike status in the family more. Having grown up poor, Maggie wants to be the child who's got her own. It's a tricky act to pull off, and one that can all too easily expose an actress's weaknesses. On the night I saw the show, I could feel Rose's anxiety in the role immediately. She may be too young for the part, and too full of self-regard. As she stretches and cozies up to Brick like an animal circling its hoped-for owner, her movements seem too studied--one feels that her desire is annoying enough for any man to turn his back on.

Under Debbie Allen's eager-to-please direction, the women are either caricatures or shrill harridans. As Brick's doting mother, Big Mama, Phylicia Rashad (Allen's sister) is a parody of the Southern matriarch. And as Brick's sister-in-law Mae--a broad part that should be played subtly--Lisa Arrindell Anderson is merely a shouter; she's all clenched and flexed. We see her ambition, but nothing of the twisted spirit that informs it. In general, Allen seems barely interested in exploring Williams's soulfulness. Twice during the show, she has a black saxophone player walk onstage and blow a mournful tune. Why? To remind us that this is an all-black production?

Race plays as much or as little a role in this revival as you want it to. When the incredible Jones uses the word "nigger," to describe his boyhood self, you can feel how hard Big Daddy has worked to rise above all epithets to become himself. The smallness of life hasn't stood in Big Daddy's way, and this is one reason that Brick's resignation baffles his father, even as he reaches out to him. Jones ...