Delta Wildcat

By T.E. Kalem

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Great playwrights differ in their gifts, but they possess one attribute in common. They create great characters, people who live long beyond the run of the play and stalk the corridors of the mind. Hamlet the play is 373 years old; Hamlet the character is immortal.

Among living playwrights, none has created more such characters than Tennessee Williams. Actors and actresses rise to these roles with peak efforts, sometimes giving the most memorable performances of their careers. The present revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is just that sort of triumph.

Elizabeth Ashley left the New York stage slightly over a decade ago as a lovely ingenue. She returns, still ravishingly beautiful, as an actress assoluta. Her Maggie the Cat is sensuous, wily, febrile, gallant, and scorchingly Southern.

Her heart belongs to Brick (Keir Dullea), who spurns her in bed and is drowning in alcohol out of fear that he may be a homosexual. Brick's father, Big Daddy (Fred Gwynne), is dying of cancer, and the childless Maggie is in a steely duel with Brick's brother Gooper (Charles Siebert) and his fecund wife Mae (Joan Pape) for the imminent in heritance of "28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile." What evolves is a series of confrontations that would reduce the forthcoming Foreman-Ali fight to a game of pattycake.

Gwynne's Big Daddy is a man of cutting cruelty, but he lacks the roguish animal magnetism of Burl Ives in the 1955 original. Dullea is much too nerveless as Brick; his crutch upstages him. Stalwart Kate Reid rates a special citation for her earthy, grieving, raging Big Mama. But it is Elizabeth Ashley, purring, clawing, fighting for her man, who gives the play a mesmeric, electrifying intensity. qed T.E.K.

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