Theatre in Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Rodgers Theatre)

	Ciarán Hinds, Benjamin Walker. Photo: Joan Marcus

The occasionally gripping, yet thoroughly unnecessary, revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a first-class example of the pickle that Broadway finds itself in these days. This is the third revival of Tennessee Williams' drama since 2004; on average, that's one production every three years. If you include the (very good) Kathleen Turner version from 1990, it's one every 5.5 years. Nobody loves Cat more than I do, but do we really need a new production almost as often as we swear in presidents?

Apparently, the answer is yes, if you have a willing star, but of late the results have not been pretty. The 2004 revival, based on a much-better West End staging starring Frances O'Connor and Brendan Fraser, foundered when Ashley Judd and Jason Patric took over for Broadway. I will draw a veil over Debbie Allen's 2008 production, which turned it into a kind of Tyler Perry comedy-melodrama marked by James Earl Jones' spectacularly wrongheaded Big Daddy. Both were little more than star packages, which is all right if the stars can deliver the goods and the director has something to say about the play. Sadly, both are absent at the Richard Rodgers.

The trouble signs are there as soon as the lights go up on a bedroom in a Southern mansion riddled with family secrets and infested with spies. Maggie, Williams' heroine, is one of his most vivid creations. Raised in genteel poverty, she has hit the jackpot -- or so she thinks -- in marrying Brick, the handsome football hero and probable heir to an enormous Mississippi plantation. As the play begins, it is all slipping through her fingers -- the sexual electricity with Brick, the chance of motherhood, the inheritance -- thanks to dark events that have driven Brick into an alcoholic retreat. "That's all very well, Maggie," he says, in response to her entreaties, "but how in hell do you expect to have a child by a man who can't stand you?"

The first act, which consists almost entirely of Maggie trying to get a rise out of Brick, puts her on display in all her colors. She is seductive, enraged, wisecracking, cajoling, and desperate, her nerves stretched to the breaking point, her longing for sex with Brick almost palpable. But, costumed and coiffed (by Julie Weiss and Paul Huntley) to look older than her 29 years, Scarlett Johansson can't find the rich melodies in Williams' words; instead, she builds her characterization on a single shrill note, barking her lines like a general issuing orders. She attacks the marathon first act like a runner in training, racing through her speeches to keep herself from getting winded. ("Your voice sounds like you're running upstairs to warn someone that the house is on fire," she is told at one point, and never has that lined resonated as it does here.) Her face frozen into a hard mask of disapproval, she gives each line the same frantic pacing and hectoring tone. Even when delivering some of Williams' most amusingly malicious dialogue, she gets no laughs. (Maggie's characterization of Goober's children as "no-neck monsters" -- usually a surefire line -- gets little more than a handful of giggles here.) After a few minutes, Brick's dependence on alcohol begins to seem entirely reasonable. Everyone else on stage may be playing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Johansson is starring in The Taming of the Shrew.

Things improve noticeably in Act II, where the main event is the face-off between Brick and Big Daddy, one of the juiciest scenes in the Williams canon. Like a surgeon operating without anesthetic, Big Daddy drags out of Brick the secret that is eating him alive -- the homoerotic friendship with Skipper, his teammate and companion, that collapsed after college, killed off by Skipper's drinking and his desperate fling with Maggie, already married to Brick, in a pathetic attempt to prove himself heterosexual. Ciarán Hinds is a fine Big Daddy, restlessly prowling the stage, his eyes narrowed in contempt at the gaggle of grasping fools he has sired, poised to attack his son with a cauterizing mixture of love and fury. Opposite him, Benjamin Walker's Brick, terrorized by his father's love and the honesty it demands, suddenly leaps to life; he makes Brick's anguished recollection of the final encounter with Skipper, which bared the truth about their relationship, into an animal cry of pain. The director, Rob Ashford, emphasizes the scene's physical impact, whether Big Daddy is flinging Brick's crutch out of reach, doubling over in gut-searing pain, or engaging in a struggle with his son that sends them both toppling over onto the bed. And when Brick, offering one bitter truth for another, reveals that Big Daddy is dying of cancer, Hinds' stunned, stoic reaction, and the mingled notes of love, exasperation, and regret in Walker's voice are just about perfect.

It's in the third act, however, that one begins to suspect that Ashford's direction, in addition to being unevenly cast, is a collection of theatrical effects in search of a unifying vision. Christopher Oram's striking set places a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling windows around a big brass bed; it's an open, airy concept that suggests the lack of the privacy in the household. But when a storm erupts just as Big Mama, Big Daddy's put-upon spouse, casts a malediction on her scheming progeny, the accompanying thunder, lightning, and wind effects undercut the otherwise fine work of Debra Monk. (More to the point, why don't the servants shut any of the windows? Do they want the house to blow down?) The climactic scenes are also marred by the sound of negro spirituals being sung offstage; it's both distracting and clichéd -- this isn't Tara, you know -- part of the barrage of music and sound cues provided by the designer Adam Cork. Throughout, the play's bruising conflicts aren't framed to their best advantage; instead, they're sometimes lost in a barrage of fussy details.

Ashford does stage the play at a blessedly lively place, and he gets good work out of Michael Park, whose Goober has nursed a lifelong grudge against Big Daddy, and Emily Bergl, as smiling, acid-tongued Mae. Neil Austin's lighting, which moves from sultry afternoon sun to searing sunset to chilling moonlight, is rather striking. But this is a production that, from moment to moment, excites and frustrates in equal measure.

And that's how business is done on Broadway these days. This Cat on a Hot Tin Roof exists only as a vehicle for Johansson, and it doesn't work because Johansson is miscast. There's nothing wrong with film and television stars trying their luck in the theatre -- Johansson was excellent a few seasons back in A View from the Bridge -- if they can do the job. But the current plan -- to trot out the same handful of classics over and over, whether or not they are appropriately cast -- isn't working too well. Some imagination is required; otherwise, we'll be looking at another, equally unsatisfying, Cat in 2016.--David Barbour