Playwright: Tennessee Williams. At: Circle Theatre, 7300 W. Madison, Forest Park. Tickets: 708-771-0700; www.circle-theatre.org . Runs through: Oct. 4
An avaricious woman rapes her drunken husband in order to become pregnant, thereby ingratiating herself to her dying father-in-law and securing a hefty inheritance. Cat most definitely is about Maggievoluptuous wife of sodden but sexy Brickand her maneuvers in a property struggle with her in-laws. The sub-conflict between Brick and his father, Big Daddy, merely is a distraction. It's theme of repressed homosexuality is central to Tennessee Williams's writing, but it's purpose is to reveal how far Maggie will go to make Brick and the family fortune hers. She outs Brick's best bud and helps drive him to suicide. Is Brick himself gay? In director Jim Schneider's reading the answer is no. Does he loathe himself and Maggie for complicity in his friend's death? Definitely yes.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a great actors' play and remains powerful, but it has weaknesses. It's far too long, filled with unnecessary minor characters and repetitive dialogue and actions. How many times must the children"no-neck monsters"interrupt things? They are properly comical in this production, but surely two or three times would be enough. How often must we hear "spastic colon?" Editing was not Tennessee's strong suit.
For all its faults, however, Cat is a pungent stew of comedy, vulgarity and frank sexuality that must have shocked when new in 1955. Williams softened his original ending for Broadway while Hollywood all but eviscerated it. Brick and Big Daddy condemn "mendacity," yet the play's denouement depends on Maggie's lie which they both let stand; the final irony in Williams's poetic but unsubtle drama.
Circle Theatre calls its staging "a voyeuristic production" that "highlights the original intentions of the playwright." Voyeurism seems to mean a set with see-through walls and a tremendously claustrophobic feeling in a house where no secrets can be kept, while original intentions seems to mean adding "fuck," "sissy" and "queer" to the play's vocabulary. Schneider and scenic designer Bob Knuth also place all three acts in Maggie and Brick's bedroom, which isn't as written.
None of this adds anything but neither does it detract as Schneider has found the comedy, vulgarity and sexuality of the piece through lively pace and cartoon-like exaggeration. With Deanna Norman ( an engaging Big Momma ) and K. D. O'Hair ( calculating Mae, mother of the no-necks ) padded front-and-back, the shapely and self-aware Maggie of Kimberly Logan is the only woman who appears real. Ditto Brick among the men, since Big Daddy ( somewhat too affable Jim Farrell ) is a parody figure from the get-go. Dark Michael Borgmann's Brick chiefly is stoical. He shows Brick's sullen coldness and occasional physical explosiveness but doesn't quite capture all the subtext. Still, there's more than enough heat to make this Cat dance.