"CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF" AT ACT THEATRE BRINGS MORE OF A HISS THAN A PURR —A Review

John Aylward and Brandon O'Neill as Big Daddy and Brick
Photo: Chris Bennion

If “Big Daddy,” the profane and crude, but truthful, patriarch of the wealthy southern family in the play  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, actually existed, he would no doubt approve of my need to "tell it like it is" in this review. He never held back on his opinions. A production of this Tennessee Williams play runs April 17-May 17, 2015 at ACT-A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, directed by Kurt Beattie. The best thing about it is actor John Aylward's gutsy, powerful performance in the "Big Daddy" role. He gives this show some fine dramatic moments when little else does. 

Imagine a soap opera set in the Mississippi delta in the 1950s. On Big Daddy’s birthday, his eldest son and two daughters-in-law try too hard to win his favor, knowing what he himself does not yet know, that he is dying of cancer and will soon leave behind his 28,000-acre estate. The eldest son, bland and boring Gooper (Charles Leggett) and Gooper’s overly talkative and once-again-pregnant wife Mae (Morgan Rowe) have produced a next generation of annoying children to carry on the family name, while the younger, favorite son, Brick (Brandon O’Neill), a former star athlete, and his wife, Maggie (Laura Griffith) have not. It’s difficult to make babies when you don’t have sex. 

Brandon O'Neill as Brick Solo with Drink
Photo: Chris Bennion 

They don’t have sex, because Brick is an alcoholic who has turned his back on the family dramas and the marital bed. He just can’t quit mourning the death of his best and one true friend, whom his wife believes was his lover. Whether or not this was true remains a mystery. He denies it, both to himself and to her, and also to his father who, rough as he is, turns out to be far more open-minded and accepting than one might expect, especially during the 1950s. 

“Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?” Big Daddy asks Brick, although he seems to be asking the universe instead. His question expresses one of the play’s main ideas—that honest and genuine communication is often rare or impossible in families. The irony though, is that the very man who asks the question never stops talking long enough to let his son have a chance to open up to him. Brick’s best attempt is when he exclaims, “We’ve always just talked around things!” None of this leads anywhere. 

Maggie held up by a child        Photo: Chris Bennion

I grew frustrated with characters who, caught up in their own denial and self-absorption, never seem to change, grow, or learn. Where is the journey, the quest, the lesson? Obviously, Williams wrote this out of his own pain. Like this troubled family, he pulled the little bead chain on the attic light bulb to reveal all the cobwebs and broken, dusty things families hide but will never discard. Unfortunately, no one deals with the mess, leaving us in limbo without hope or satisfaction.

I kept waiting for the real Brick to emerge, but soon saw, and became bored with, the sameness of his monotone talk and behavior. Although basically drunk throughout the entire play, O’Neill did not act drunk enough or sober enough to thoroughly convince me of either state. He became emotional only briefly with his wife and again when he tangled with his father, in the second act. Brick’s scenes with Maggie lacked the chemistry that could have created a delicious tension. These characters were each victims, in their own way, but the actors portraying them did not make them win my sympathies.

In true soap opera fashion, unsatisfied sexual desire keeps company with resentment, jealousy, manipulation, fatal illness, competition, and, most of all, deception, creating a family so dysfunctional it will make most people relieved to know their own is not as bad. For three hours, the play examines all the reasons these people are miserable. It makes you laugh at times, possibly squirm at other times, care about some characters (but not much), despise others, and feel compassion, so is moderately successful in those ways. 

Laura Griffith solo on the bed         Photo: Chris Bennion 

The “Cat” herself, Maggie, has an impressive number of lines to say in the first act, as she nervously paces around the bedroom, dressed only in a slip. Her physical acting was good, but I wanted Griffith to s-l-o-w  d-o-w-n her lines, take an occasional breath, and deliver them with a pacing and style that could seduce, not pummel. My husband compared it to a blues record played at the wrong speed, with the words all right but the timing all wrong. Sure, she was frustrated and upset, wanted to make a point, relentlessly campaigning to get her husband back in her bed, both for her own satisfaction and to produce a child. But Griffith’s delivery did not match her sultry appearance and reminded me of something I’ve heard men say—that even the sexiest looking woman can be a turn-off if she never shuts up. 

The audience loved to laugh out loud at Big Daddy’s wife, Big Mama (Marianne Owen), a woman who seemed dressed and directed purposely to remind you of Edith Bunker in the television show “All in the Family” but far less intelligent. Worse than Archie’s treatment of Edith, Big Daddy’s distain for his wife implies a deeper issue than her weight and aging appearance (no worse than his own) and her admittedly irritating manner. Why she loves him, and she truly does, is a mystery, but her heartache over his looming death is real. 

Gooper and Mae, once they know the old man is dying, waste no time trying to take control and rob Big Mama of what little power she has. Owen made me feel compassion for her character, revealing a woman with complex emotions and loyalties. Owen excelled in the emotional scene where Big Mama learns the truth about her husband’s health. It bothered me that so many others in the audience seemed to see her only as laughable.

 Morgan Rowe and Charles Leggett              Photo: Chris Bennion 

Charles Leggett did well enough in his role of Gooper, as did Morgan Rowe as Mae, but neither impressed me as much as they both have in other plays. As despicable as their characters were, they still served to remind us of some ugly truths—parents can and do play favorites, with devastating affect, and every family has someone waiting to collect an inheritance. 

The staging of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at ACT has historical significance in that ACT presented this play during its first season, 50 years ago. Director Kurt Beattie greeted the audience on opening night and mentioned that he made his debut as a professional actor there in 1975. He called the play “an enduring American classic.” So it seems, but enduring the production I saw was a classic case of going into something expecting and wanting to love it, like I do most plays at ACT, but never reaching that state. In spite a proven old recipe, this piece of southern cornbread just wasn’t hot enough to melt my butter.

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A REVIEW OF "ASSISTED LIVING" AT ACT- A CONTEMPORARY THEATRE—CHOOSE TO DIE LAUGHING

Pictured Kurt Beattie and Tim Gouran
Photo: (c) LaRae Lobdell

Laughter, no matter how genuine, can also feel like whistling in the dark when theatrical comedy looks too much like possible reality. I had a hunch I would enjoy the world premiere of Katie Forgette’s play Assisted Living—a Mainstage Production in The Falls Theatre at ACT, April 19-May 12—and oh how I did. I laughed hard and often, like everyone around me. But I think my own laughter hid an emotion felt by many others in the audience: foreboding.

I loved this play and I highly recommend it. I consider the writing brilliant and the acting superb.  But it didn’t take long to understand why the theater’s press release said Assisted Living “ ... takes a darkly comical look at America’s current health care system and where it could be headed.” The story is set in a future version of our nation that we hope we’ll never see, after the collapse of the health care system and the demise of Medicare. With so many baby boomers now old and ill, and space at a premium, prisons have been emptied and their inmates sent to Pakistan, so prison buildings can be used as elder care institutions under the Senior Provision Act, a.k.a “SPA.”

MITZI GRABS Laura Kenny Tim Gouran
Photo: Alan Alabastro

Even if you have a healthy appreciation for the “gallows humor” secretly shared among people who work in law enforcement or medicine, you might not be prepared for the opening scene. It’s nighttime in a prison-turned-assisted living facility. A young orderly named Kevin, prone to horseplay and singing to himself, steers a loaded gurney into a darkened lobby, pulls back a rug, lifts a hidden hatch cover, and dumps a corpse down a chute. That is, of course, after removing the dead woman’s bracelet. He yells to an unseen person below, “Stiff. Incoming!”

Get used to it. In what we hope is only a side-splitting farce, the now elderly baby boomers end up in government-run nursing homes, with all their assets sold at government-run auctions in order to pay for every single item needed for their government-run care, even bags for bodily fluids. No mooching off Uncle Sam in SPA Facility No. 273! In an ultra-conservative society, it’s downright unpatriotic to ask for any help from your fellow citizens who pay taxes.

And those people who ever ate junk food, gained weight, smoked, drank, or did anything else in their lives that possibly led to their chronic health problems (or, in other words, were human) are considered immoral, unpatriotic leaches on society, and disposable, for the good of the taxpayers. In order to save money, this place even has a robot named “Hal” for a night nurse. We never see him, but the idea of this inhuman machine patrolling the darkened halls felt frightening and creepy to me, as did the ever present hypodermic needle gun, ready to over medicate anyone who did not comply.

Pictured Tim Gouran and Jeff Steitzer
Photo: (c) LaRae Lobdell

When new resident Joe Taylor (played by ACT’s Artistic Director Kurt Beattie) moves into No. 273, it isn’t because he had squandered his God-given former good health. He’d been mugged, resulting in a fall that broke his hip, causing him to be hospitalized more than once, ill with pneumonia, etc. etc. No matter. To the bitter, unsmiling, accusatory and hysterically funny Nurse Claudia (Julie Briskman), these inmate-residents are all the same: worthless—and unworthy of respect, dignity, or compassion. As a member of a generation that expected entitlements, but didn’t get, she now resents the baby boomers and her anger is palpable.

Deeply disturbed by what he finds in his new environment, Taylor tries to lift the spirits of his fellow residents. He had been an actor, and when he discovers other former actors in his midst, he convinces them to read plays and give a holiday performance for families and fellow residents. Those other actors are—Beatrice “Judy” Hart (Marianne Owen, Beattie’s real-life wife) and Wally Carmichael (Jeff Steitzer), the later from whom Nurse Claudia withholds hearing aid batteries.  Another member of their troupe, a former nurse named Mitzi Kramer (Laura Kenny) copes with her circumstances (and incontinence) by caring for others and maintaining her cheerfulness. With some cooperation from the orderly Kevin (Tim Gouran) they secretly rehearse. 

TWINKIE Julie Briskman Jeff Steitzer
Photo: Alan Alabastro

Nurse Claudia is outraged at the idea of this uprising, which upsets her tightly ordered world. She dominates through her strict schedule of too much quiet time and too little visiting time, and she controls through fear, medical sedation, and the constant threat of banishment to the first floor, from which people never return. But rest assured; good, at least temporarily, triumphs over evil, and the plot takes a satisfying twist at the end.

All through the drama, razor-sharp humor, combined with moments of poignancy and tenderness kept me 100% engaged. But having already read a shocking article in the play’s program—filled with statistics about how aging baby boomers will impact the health care system—that projected scenario weighed on my mind even as I laughed. And I knew too much about a real assisted living facility, where both my father and mother-in-law once lived.



TRIUMPH Tim Gouran Jeff Steitzer Laura Kenny Marianne Owen Kurt Beattie
Photo: Alan Alabastro



Whether you laugh your head off or feel a little shiver down your spin (or most likely both) you will recognize three important things:

1.) ACT has done it again, giving us the highest quality theater experience, a feast of talent.

2.) Writer Katie Forgette (whose husband, the acclaimed actor R. Hamilton Wright, directed the play) is a genius. I can’t wait to see what she will create next.

3.) Art matters. If anyone ever needed an example of how art examines issues in our society and makes us think, this is it.

Don’t let the disturbing parts keep you from enjoying the outrageous humor this play offers. Your own mind will scare you more than anything you’ll see here. For many of us in the audience, perhaps the creepiest thing of all is realizing the baby boomer generation is now the oldest surviving one, in this not-too-distant fictional future. The show opens with the Beattle’s song “Help” and closes with Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are a Changin,” and the juxtaposition of my generation’s music with images of the nation’s oldest citizens felt like a shock.

Go see this play. And take an ultra-conservative politician with you. Please.

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