I have been going through old work and I can't force myself to discard this stuff. This is part of a ten performance review project. I'll post more later.
Yesterday I attended a performance of Tennessee William's A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The performance was staged by "A Noise Within", the resident production company at The Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex, located at Cal State Los Angeles. The June 24 performance was directed by Julie Rodriquez Elliott and Geoff Elliot and starred Jennifer Erin Roberts as at the frantically clawing Margaret; Geoff Elliot as the alcoholic floundering Brick; and Mitchell Edmonds as the crude and powerful Big Daddy.
The most remarkable element of this performance is the convention of sexuality that the play addresses and the devastation wrought upon a family because sexual conventions were breached. This play swirls around the moral attitudes held toward held toward homosexuality and its unacceptability in mid-twentieth century America. The male lead, Brick has become an alcoholic wreck since the death of his best friend Skipper. Through sexual manipulation, Brick's wife Margaret brought about the realization that Skipper loved Brick in a romantic way; while Brick felt his relationship with Skipper was "a real true thing" - a pure male friendship, without any sexual overtones or improprieties. In the opening scene Brick and his beautiful but desperate wife, Margaret, are clad in their underwear, trapped in their bedroom, being quickly smothered by the poison that is brewing between them. Margaret is powdering, preening and nervously chattering from her dressing table on one side of their bed. She is trying to draw and hold her drunken husband's attention and love although he can only be drawn to the bar that lies on the other side of their bed. Brick is literally drowning in his own brew and unable to accept or tolerate his wife's own difficult brand of (sexually driven) love because of the emotional devastation she has wrought.
In a sense, his dying father Big Daddy, mirrors Brick. Big Daddy is dying from a cancer gone too far to cure. It is Big Daddy that draws out Brick's reason for drinking. Big Daddy painfully extracts the truth of the matter - that Skipper loved Brick homosexually - and Brick's outright rejection of his "true" friend drove Skipper to his death. Like the cancer that is eating Big Daddy, the violation of the sexual mores is eating, and killing, Brick. Brick is obviously emotionally unable to deal with his friend's particular kind of love and when Big Daddy tries to tell him this is not shocking Brick yells, "You called me a queer...You shock me Big Daddy, talking so casually about things like that". But these performances show that the "things like that" are enough to kill one man and nearly kill another because they are so far outside acceptable sexual behavior for their time.
I felt completely enthralled in the characters and their story. The plays central meaning slowly and delicately unfolded between the interplay of desperation and pain in the form of Margaret, Brick and Big Daddy and the emotional vacuousness of Sister Woman, Gooper and Big Momma. The performances were excellent and without flaw. I found myself sympathizing with a desperately clinging woman, an emotionally unavailable alcoholic and a crude overbearing dominator. These characters rang true and at the end of the play I felt entirely satisfied with them as messengers of a very insightful truth.
The most significant aspect of this performance of William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the moral convention it bore to light and the dangers this convention held for those that play around its frays. The interplay of the characters Margaret, Brick and Big Daddy delicately portrayed the levels to which this danger can penetrate people, literally eating at them like a cancer. When the crude and brutally truthful Big Daddy tells Brick, "You can't buy back your life" it is an attempt to bring his son back to the living and to show us how precious life really is. This performance portrayed the human animal as a deep creature with no greater enemy than itself and its social conventions.
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