AISLE SAY New York

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Debbie Allen
Starring Anika Noni Rose, Terrence Howard,
James Earl Jones and Phylicia Reahad
Broadhurst Theatre, West 44th Street

Reviewed by David Spencer

 

     When Anika Noni Rose made her first entrance in this first all-black revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and launched into the sensuous, provocative Maggie’s first monologue, I was really concerned about style and tone. It wasn’t merely that she was “doin’ it black,” she was doin’ it shrill, the nattering and gossip, in cadence and diction, sounding indistinguishable from the way you might hear boistrous inner-city schoolgirls chatting energetically away on a Queens bus. And I must admit it, I thought Am I just being a white guy here, or is this legitimately wrong?

     Then Terrence Howard as her husband, the tortured, haunted Brick, hiding it all behind a veil of alcoholic indifference, opened his mouth to speak, and it was yet another kind of black: casual, loose, streetwise. And then I thought Hmmmm. Indeed, once his and others' characters started to interact with Maggie, Ms. Rose’s performance modulated down to a proper proportion and became very interesting.

     I stopped seeing through the preconceptions of my ethnic filter and began to see through theirs, buying in completely, when Phylicia Rashad made her entrance as Big Mama, and, notwithstanding her own distinctive nuances, essentially gave the matriarch the familiar black spin on her nickname, but playing it for real rather than parody. Because it was then that I clued into what the Afro-American segment of the audience (judging from their quite vocal reaction) had already doped out: that this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was not merely an exercise in color-blind or color-shift casting: this was being approached as if the characters had always been black. Genuinely black. Intended to be black. And that gave it a whole new dynamic. Didn’t distort the play, its values, its story or its characters (at least not from my Northern perspective; I have no idea what issues a history-minded Southerner—black or white—would care to raise). But rather viewed them through the prism of a different cultural perspective.

     Cool, I thought. But it was not my final thought.

     For there was still the shrillness of Ms. Rose’s opening monologue to process…It felt off-kilter, even considering the emphasis of the production. I certainly understood the device's power as a way of announcing to the audience, We’re going down this road completely without apology, nothing diluted, so hang onto your hats. But there were other, more seductive, more Maggie-like ways of setting up that permission, and it seemed to me that shock confrontation was not the most artful option. And as the the play progressed it also seemed an incongrous choice; not in sync with the tone of anything that followed. So it continued to nag at me. I didn’t quite understand why until I confronted worry number two:

     I worry about James Earl jones, have for several years, ever since I saw him recreate an excerpt from August Wilson’s Fences at a Dramatists Guild Award ceremony. He had been kind of sputtering then, stumbling over his lines, not picking up cues from his acting partner fast enough. He hadn’t lost his grandiose power, but what seemed very compromised was his ability to harness it cleanly, and I remember thinking, with some sadness: The ravages of time…He’s old.

     So I wondered about him playing Big Daddy. Of all the well-known actors of color, he’s hands down the obvious, let’s-not-even-reflect-on-it choice. Da man, pure and simple. Or would have been, when he was at the top of his game. But I feared that, somewhere between his last Broadway appearance, in On Golden Pond, in 2005, and now, the edge of that game had dulled.

     And sure enough: he comes on as Big Daddy with all the requisite thunder and bluster, that great, iconic voice filling the theatre…but there’s that stuttering energy to the picking up of many cues, fuhmfering within lines, mild little paraphrases or extra vocalizations or bumps of repetition as he dog-paddles toward the conclusion of the line, toward the next one. It’s not embarrassing, nor as dire as it sounds, and perhaps even the inexpert viewer wouldn’t recognize a problem, per se, but s/he’d certainly know, on some level, that something was off.

     It’s especially noticeable in the long Act Two scene between Big Daddy and Brick (coincidentally a father-son scene, just like the excerpt from Fences). Mr. Howard is unable to drive the scene because for the most part he’s the dramatic straight man for Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones simply doesn’t have control of the pacing, rhythm is missing in the interplay, and as a result, the scene splutters along ten, perhaps even more, minutes longer than it ought—

     —and as I was observing that, I flashed on what had bugged me about Ms. Rose’s solo turn earlier. And then I knew.

     The director simply is not present.

     Oh, I’m sure Debbie Allen was physically there, every step of the way, and said move here, cross there, let’s do a thing with lights on this monologue (she does like to isolate them when they’re long enough to be little arias), and as an actress herself she no doubt talked with her cast about motivation and intension. But moving people around is only a tiny facet of staging (blocking isn’t merely about traffic patterns; it’s about creating images and controlling the viewer’s eye); and character investigation is only classroom work if it isn’t eventually also informed by pace, tempo, delivery and tone.

     Whatever Mr. Jones’s elder statesman lapses, the fact appears to be that he had no help in overcoming them. Nor did Ms. Rose in dialing down and shading her opening monologue. And indeed the entire production is full of such ragged edges; at its very best it seems like an early dress rehearsal of a no-frills staging, when people are just starting to test out the whole, figure out where they fit in and get their bearings -- not like a polished production of Broadway caliber -- despite the Broadway pedigree of its greatly gifted performers. Those performers also include the redoubtable Giancarlo Esposito as the scheming “Brother Man” Gooper, and Lisa Arrindell Anderson as his complicit wife, “Sister Woman” Mae (theirs are in fact the two most controlled and textured performances, as if they’d scoped out their own safety zone in private; I have no idea if that happened, but such things do happen when actors see the need to protect themselves, and I wouldn’t be surprised.)

     And yet…the night I attended, the vast majority of the black audience that was there (and they were there in force) seemed not to be distracted by any of this. They clearly picked up on plot points and character turns that I thought had been all-but-buried in the sloppy production, and reveled in a classic play being reinterpreted in a style that spoke to their roots and sensibilities—and with a cast featuring major-league stars—their stars—to boot.

     And one can’t underestimate the importance of that.

     But I have to believe—really, I need to believe—that the real victory is the fire of Tennessee Williams, when he was at the top of his game, triumphing over all.

   For when I hit the men’s room after the performance, two black gentlemen were there, finishing up at the sinks. These were middle aged guys, seemed to be upper middle class, and it seemed that this had been their introduction to Cat, and I also got the feeling they'd read Brantley's review in the Times (which had called the production flabby), because the conversation went like this:

     “I’m sorry, I had a good time.”

     “Yeah. I guess you can’t believe everything you read.”

     “Actually, it’s a pretty powerful story.”

     “I thought so too. The man writes a good play.”

     Leave it at that, then. Leave it at that ...

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