With lots of noise but little action, the heat of sensuality is surprisingly low-temp in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.Scarlett Johannson charges her interpretation of Maggie the Cat with fierceness, desperation, and determination, but her feline is more lioness than sex kitten. She cajoles, challenges and demands her aloof, alcoholic husband, Brick (Benjamin Walker), to impregnate her and thus insure his inheritance. But Brick is a disgruntled ex-jock shorn of all hope or ambition. He despises Maggie and has no interest in his family plantation. Everything he needs is in a bottle of bourbon as leans on his crutch and waits for ''that little click in my head that makes me peaceful.”
On this hot, sultry, overcharged evening in the mid-1950s, The Pollitt brood has gathered to celebrate the old man’s 65th birthday. Big Daddy is a self-made Mississippi fat cat, inflated with success, ruler of a vast cotton plantation. He has just been through a medical exam and was told he is free of cancer. Later, his children plan to tell him and Big Mama (Debra Monk) the truth that he is actually dying.
This is not a genteel family who elicit much sympathy or admiration. Just as Maggie is fighting for her husband’s inheritance, younger brother, Gooper (Michael Park) and his wife, Mae (Emily Bergl) are scheming behind closed doors. Big Daddy may not like them much but they have an edge with their litter of five boisterous children and another on the way.
Director Rob Ashford choreographs a cast of capable actors whose characters embody the mendacity that rules the play. Beneath the high-volume conniving and bellowing, everyone is living a lie. Benjamin Walker, who starred recently in Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson, is the family’s golden boy, destined to take his father’s place. When he is not hobbling across the stage toward the liquor stash, he is poised like a marble statue draped in a white towel or white silk pajamas. Brick, however, is crippled in deeper ways than a broken ankle. He hates himself as much as he detests Maggie for her one-night stand with his late, suspiciously close friend, Skipper. He is tortured by his feelings toward Skipper, questioning his sexuality and masculinity.
A seminal moment comes when Big Daddy ferociously confronts him about Skipper, and Brick reacts with fury and violence, both of them landing on the bed that reigns in the center of the stage. Brick blurts out that the doctors were lying, and his father is dying.
As Big Daddy, Ciarán Hinds is one of the few cast members who maintains a Southern accent, notable since Hinds is an Irish actor. While he lacks the oversized vulgarity of a Mississippi redneck, he blusters with a mix of brashness and loving disappointment in his favorite son’s drunkenness. His cruel streak is sharp; at one point he roars that he hates the sight, sound, and smell of Big Mama, his wife of 40 years. Debra Monk, a boisterous, sometimes screeching, cartoonish Big Mama, laughs away the insults, struts across the stage, often veering across the room to caress her darling, Brick, who recoils from her and everyone else. Johannson is a savvy stage actress, winner of a Tony Award in 2010 for A View From the Bridge. In this interpretation, Maggie’s love for Brick takes second place to her determination not to be poor again. Maggie plays up her special bond with Big Daddy, realizing he has a “lech” for her, and in her wickedly humorous turn of phrase, she calls Mae a "monster of fertility" and the children, “no-neck monsters.” At the end, Maggie presents Big Daddy with the gift he most wants, her pregnancy, but this gift is just another fantasy. As Mae, Maggie’s sister-in-law, Emily Bergl is deliciously saccharine, although husband, Gooper, is often lost in the swirl of roustabout children, family and staff meandering around Christopher Oram’s vast stage of billowing curtains, high doors, and the conspicuously unused bed.
In the large Richard Rodgers Theater, the sound volume is challenging. Added to the chatter and the children’s cap guns are Adam Cork’s summer sounds of crickets, thunder and fireworks. Lighting by Neil Austin is ethereal with branches brushing against the curtains like an invading threat.
There are no answers in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Tennessee Williams powerfully examines the emotions and experiences of a hard, unfeeling world. Of the numerous productions, this Cat comes closest to revealing the truth about Brick and his relationship with Skipper.
