On the Hot Seat

PLAYS WRITTEN BY Tennessee Williams reek of viciousness, violence, and sexual tension. Some of his most famous characters--Amanda in The Glass Menagerie and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire--struggle with self-control and eventually find themselves unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. The characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, however, face an unmistakingly real existence controlled by alcoholism, latent homosexuality, and insatiable desire and greed. A successful production of any Williams play requires an intimate understanding of the underlying themes and a willingness to confront them straight on without embellishing the lines with sappy overacting. In a Williams play, the starkness of the words themselves creates the overlying tensions and consequently should be allowed to speak for themselves.

The actors in the current Dunster House production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof let the words of their characters speak for themselves, and by doing so they arouse our fascination in their relationships. Under the brilliant direction of Kevin Jennings, the actors submerge themselves in the plot and use the sharply vivid language to reveal their characters' mental anguish and desperate attempts at making some sense of their lives. Mounted in the small, dimly lit Dunster Junior Common Room, the play is set on the same level as the audience. The proximity of the actors to the audience is mentally as well as physically intimate. Jennings has merged the play's three acts into one uninterrupted two hour production, forcing the actors to maintain their physically draining characterizations without any chance to catch their breath.

Three performances particularly stand out: James Houghton as Brick. Hannah Cox as Maggie, and Jon King as Big Daddy. Each one-envelops his character, letting the lines prompt his actions and reveal his own particular inner turmoil: Houghton's Brick, who is Big Daddy's son and Maggie's husband, drowns himself in alcohol and gradually becomes alive as he is forced to explain why he has turned away from the world and steeped himself in his own self-disgust. Houghton endows Brick with a taut passivity; his physical outlashes stun us with their uncontrollable violence, revealing his character's inability to accept his guilt about his feelings of love for his dead friend Skipper. Cox's Maggie exploits Brick's passivity and seeming impotence as she desperately tries to reawaken his love for her. Cox portrays a sensual, hyperactive, and manipulative Maggie. At times she stumbles over her lines, not from nervousness but rather from rushing them a bit too much. All the same, we sympathize with her character's submersion in Brick's passionless, greedy family.

Even though he only appears for a short time in the middle of the play. King as Big Daddy needs no make-up or accentuated costuming to reveal his character's excessively domineering personality and unwillingness to accept his mortality. King delivers his lines loudly and at times cruelly, revealing Big Daddy's physical strength and his unexpectedly delicate love for Brick.

THE ENTIRE CAST deftly use Southern accents, accentuating the vapidity of the Mississippi setting and its mores. By the end of the play, the room has become stifling not only from the lack of circulation but also from steam infiltrating the characters conversations and actions. We don't mind being uncomfortable, because it enables us to share the characters' repression and desire to escape from the room.

The actual set is simple, consisting of a bed, nighttable, a sofa, and a table set with a bottle of liquor. But it does not stand out on its own. We only notice it when the actors use various props, when Brick fills his cup or when Maggie nervously makes up her face.

The focus of this production is on the fluid, intense interactions between characters, and Jennings never lets excessive motions detract from the power of the character's language. In his two productions last year Enemy of the People and The Mother. Jennings let extreme political leftism overshadow the acting. But in this play, Jennings has cast political sentiment aside and concentrated his attentions on accentuating the fineness of the acting.

Cat on A Hot Tin Roof will never be an enjoyable play to watch because it assaults too many brutal problems haunting people. But if the audience realizes this and allows itself to be swept into the setting, the characters, and their relationships, then the play will have a devastating effect, forcing us to confront our own problems, and our difficulties in expressing our thoughts. This particular production, superbly interpreted by the cast, plays off of the audience's attention, and as we get consumed in their actions, they in turn become more and more tense and brutal, relaxing their grip only when the lights go.