First Preview of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — Page 3

Wait when does Ben Walker get naked? and how much?

Re, the set.

The theatre is too big for the play; the stage is too big for the set; the set is too spread out to accommodate the stage.

I understand Skipper as very much the third person in Brick & Maggie's marriage--Brick is obsessed with his memory and Maggie is fighting with him for Brick's attention. I see where the idea of putting Skipper on-stage comes from, but I think it's a bad idea. As others have said quite eloquently already in this thread, it is the job of the actors to evoke Skipper and his importance and the job of the audience to understand how large he looms in the action.

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This is a bitter take on this life-affirming and wonderful play. And sadly it doesn't work at all. Where is the love? Scarlett speeds through the first act like she was on benzadrine, with little modulation and a complete lack of likability. It's Brick who is supposed to find her annoying. Not us. Never has there been a Maggie with so little vulnerability. Is it really Ashford's intent to make Maggie as mendacious and soulless as Gooper and May? To keep not only Brick but the entire audience wondering if she really loves him? On top of which I couldn't hear half of what she was saying. I admire her work in film and loved her in A View From the Bridge so I was very surprised at how off her mark she is here. If you don't care about Maggie from the get go, there is nothing at stake and this becomes a very long evening.

Ghost Skipper, for reasons many have already stated, is atrocious but it was the least of my problems. Walker and Monk do the best they can under the circumstances. The best thing I can say about Hinds is that he isn't replicating his Political Animals character as Big Daddy (which was my fear); but he also mostly fails to connect with the love that has to be underneath all of Big Daddy's bluster (apart from with Brick).

The set is flouncy and pretty. The spaciousness provides the requisite mobility but the centrality of the bed was wearing (topped off with Skipper right behind it at curtain call - Jesus Christ!). And someone is going to have to explain to me the backdrop curtains behind the room curtains.

Do yourself a favor, stay home and watch Newman, Taylor and Ives.

Updated On: 12/27/12 at 01:02 AM

This production is using Williams' original script, in which Maggie is less sympathetic. As Williams told it, a sympathetic Maggie was imposed by Kazan in the original production, and then the film adaptation made her even more so. Especially because of the film, this is now what audiences expect. In the original script, although she laments having become so on her climb from poverty to that hot tin roof, Maggie as we meet her is a pretty soulless creature.

MARGARET: I do love you, Brick, I do!
BRICK: (smiling with charming sadness) Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?
[The Curtain Comes Down]
THE END

Such a wonderful closing paradox — is the tragedy that Maggie does love Brick, but he can no longer believe in anyone? or is the tragedy that Brick can see quite clearly that Maggie (unlike his perhaps fantasized memory of Skipper) has become part of — or has always been part of — the mendacity in which he feels he is drowning? Or is there a tragedy at all? Has, perhaps, every character gotten exactly what they deserve? (Mae is actually the most straight-up honest character in the play — a character turned into a cartoon in the film in order to make Maggie more sympathetic, when it's actually Maggie's fixated hatred of her that we should be questioning.)

For better or worse [and ghost Skipper aside], this production — in which we purposefully never have a firm grasp on who to believe or sympathize with — has very much followed Williams' original intentions.

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Updated On: 12/27/12 at 09:54 AM

Point taken. Perhaps Kazan was right and Williams wrong. Perhaps earlier productions have successfully presented this paradox even while giving us an appealing Maggie. Is this appeal, this zest for life, this "life in her body," merely on the surface? Or is she a woman truly worthy of love? These questions have always been there. They can't help be there. Susie, you seem to offer proof of this by the fact that even in the film you saw in Taylor's Maggie an unsympathetic gold digger.

Or perhaps Williams was right and those questions need to be further emphasized. Perhaps previous productions - and above all the film - have gone too far in making us root for Maggie from the very start.

What I can say for sure is that in their zeal to overcompensate, Ashford and Johannsen have failed to successfully discover the marked ambiguity Williams demanded, which might have made for a remarkable interpretation. Ironically, they have left us not with a clearer paradox (the last beautiful line of the script notwithstanding) but instead with a clearer conclusion. And a dull and sour one.

By turning Maggie into a near shrew, making Brick's "arc" non-transformative and barely detectable, and leaving us without any evidence of love (however meretricious that evidence might ultimately prove), it is almost impossible to have any interest in what happens to these people during the play, let alone any paradoxical wonder at what will happen to them after the curtain falls.

A Brick who remains on the fence as to whether he can trust Maggie could be a very powerful thing. But a Brick confronted with a transparently unlovable wife is not.

Of course, the sexual candor of this script is a welcome advance. But as to this production, it's a case of two steps forward, eight steps back.

Updated On: 12/27/12 at 10:57 AM

Followspot, I actually love this version of the script. My concerns are with the way it's being interpreted. The combination of this text and a characterization that could keep us alert, challenged and marveling at the war within us between disgust and eroticism as these forces are confronted by truth - a contest unsettled at the final curtain, even jarringly so - could be electrifying.

For me this production fails because the balance is off. Disgust triumphs.

Kazan may have been right. But only as a director. Not as a playwright. He should have left that in Tennessee's capable hands and molded it into an interpretation based on the power of opposition between the words and our impressions of the people, leaving us just enough room to scruple whether our impressions are correct (the same damning uncertainty the characters have). Then there would have been a real gut-wrenching tug of war.

The movie doesn't nearly live up to this standard for its going in the other direction. The lens of course is midcentury Hollywood which always exacted a price for Williams. But when I watched it recently I still found it compelling and extremely well acted, miraculously serving up the guts of the play through its unfortunate shackles and censorship, far more successfully than this production, for all its much-appreciated freedom, does.

This discussion btw has been great. And I'm ready to modify my original objection to our not being sure that Maggie really loves Brick (which, I was expecting due to my affection for the movie). Keeping us guessing would be a great achievement. The problem is I wasn't kept guessing. I was convinced that Maggie lives for sex and financial security alone. No ambiguity there.

Updated On: 12/27/12 at 12:11 PM

Did you not see Newman playing Newman vs Newman playing Brick? That is the problem I had with the movie. He was still just Newman- whom I love!! but still just Newman as he is pretty much in all movies. Suave, gorgeous and sexy. Still Newman.

Eric, as far as I could tell at least the majority of this production's Act Three is the original. There could very well be some elements of other versions blended in.

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^I'm a little confused, Susie. Are you saying a sexually ambivalent and or ambiguous male character, can't be suave, sexy, gorgeous and very hunky for women? Or that in any event Brick shouldn't be?

If so you may want to check out Darwin Porter's biography of Paul Newman.


his secret life exposed

Just home from tonight's show.

I just cannot understand how the ghost of Skipper has managed to remain part of this production. Worse--he's NOT a ghost. He flies through the tall French doors into a set rendered entirely in shades of gray, with Brick in White and Big Daddy in beige. Suddenly we are confronted with Skipper in blue jeans and football letterman's jacket. He's MORE real, MORE tangible than the "reality" that he is haunting. Very distracting, completely un-necessary--totally misguided.

Maggie establishes early on that you can "be young and poor or old with money, but never old and poor". She WAS young and poor and there is NO way she's going to be old and poor. Her motives are clear and unambiguous. She may, indeed, cling to a memory of the sex that she and Brick once had, but her survival instinct is what is driving her every action.

I also appreciated--more in this production than in others I have seen, and infinitely more than in the film--the relatively sympathetic portrayal of Mae & Goober--especially Goober. The symmetry between Mae and Maggie is clearly delineated they really are--as Brick says--like a pair of cats feuding over the estate. The kids are a caricature of an annoying brood, but Mae & Goober have been treated unfairly by Big Daddy and Big Mama, and their anger at Maggie's final lie is completely justified.

I thought Ms. Johansson gave a very credible performance, although she did seem to "swallow" some of her lines. It's a big house, but Emily Bergl's Mae was always clearly audible and her accent felt more organic than Maggie's.

And--yes; we get it. There's a storm coming. Enough with the rattling thunder. Oy...

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Updated On: 12/28/12 at 12:53 AM

gotcha.