Recap Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

There are few stage productions more satisfying than a Tennessee Williams play executed smartly. Williams’ plays seep with complex, interconnected misery, and the dialogue is always delivered in sharp, poetic language that’s often as humorous as it is biting. The Guthrie’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is an expertly executed performance, pitting the blunt Big Daddy against the aloof misery of his drunken son. To truly get into the conflict of a play like Williams’, you’d have to draw out some kind of map using various colors and arrows outlining each characters’ intentions and their beefs with one another. And that’s what truly makes an interesting family drama—complete fucked uppedness. The Guthrie has presented the fucked uppedness of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in the most appealing of ways. 

As the story goes, Brick and his wife Maggie have arrived at Brick’s parents’ large plantation home in the Mississippi Delta for Big Daddy’s birthday party—one that is rumored to be his last, due to some mysterious illness the characters all understand to be cancer. But Brick isn’t in the right place, mentally, and has taken to the bottle in a big way, downing gulps of brown liquor as though it’s meant to supplement each breath. Liquor is his only respite. But we quickly find that misery doesn’t fly solo, as Maggie isn’t getting any sex—sex that she badly wants, as a child would help her not only feel like a normal, accomplished woman, but will also increase her and Brick’s chances of inheriting his dying father’s large estate. 

Enter Big Daddy. Played by the fantastic David Anthony Brinkley, he is someone who truly doesn’t give a shit, and he’ll say as much, always in four letters. He’s a refreshing shift from Brick, who is a lanky, dopey, depressing drunk, and provides merely a “Oh, you think so Maggie?”-type counterpart to his wife’s most monologic wanderings in the first half of the production. Maggie’s the interesting one, and he’s just there as a way for us to hear her thoughts. But once Big Daddy enters the stage, he never really leaves, and we’re lucky for it, as the production opens up at that point and becomes a dynamic, breathing thing. Big Daddy brings on the high stakes that the other characters so expertly set up—and we finally see what’s eating Brick, who, played by Peter Christian Hansen, is much more captivating in the second half than in the first.

The true joy of the play is the way the thing climaxes. With everyone’s livelihood on the line, there’s a clear division between Brick, who clearly has given up on life and the pursuit of anything aside from the comforting “click”—his term for the moment of drunken oblivion—and all of the other characters, who care about money, inheritance, and, at the root of it, acceptance from Big Daddy.

The Guthrie production succeeds in transferring the steamy Delta to the Wurtele Thrust Stage. Classics sometimes get a modern butchering—up for debate is how the Guthrie’s current take on Julius Caesar did in this regard—but with Cat, we’re treated to about a direct translation of the play as anyone could hope to get. Williams’ work doesn’t need a filter or a quirky slant, and the Guthrie gives this powerful script the justice it deserves.