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Culture Theatre

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF by Tennessee Williams, directed by Eda Holmes (Shaw). In rep to October 23 at the Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. $24-$106. 1-800-511-7429, shawfest.com. See listing. Rating: NNNN

Sex and love, overt and hidden, drive Tennessee Williams’s powerful Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Trust director Eda Holmes to mine most of the tension in the sometimes overwrought script.

The family of Big Daddy (Jim Mezon) has gathered at his Mississippi Delta plantation for his birthday, but there are more machinations than celebrations over the course of the evening. Favoured son Brick (Gray Powell) has broken his foot on a drunken run around the track where he used to be star athlete, and his wife, Maggie (Moya O’Connell), knows that Brick’s brother, Gooper (Patrick McManus), is scheming to ensure that Big Daddy’s estate comes to him and his brood.

Maggie plans to counter by getting pregnant, but Brick, who finds comfort in a liquor bottle rather than his wife, isn’t interested, suggestively because of a close relationship with his dead friend Skipper.

Add all the lies being told to Big Daddy about the cancer that’s supposedly cured but is actually eating him up – Brick harps on the “mendacity” in the family – and the scene is set for several explosive battles.

The best of them is between father and son, a stormy confrontation in which Mezon’s argumentative, tenacious Big Daddy won’t let Powell’s squirming Brick avoid the issues the paterfamilias insists on confronting.

O’Connell, who often radiates sensuality onstage, doesn’t quite pull it off here. The first act is largely a monologue in which she tries to seduce Brick to further her plan, but the emotional sizzle isn’t there her anger, determination and love for her husband are too subdued.

There’s good comic work by McManus and Nicole Underhay as Gooper and his wife, constantly thrusting their screaming children (dubbed “no-neck monsters” by Maggie) onto Big Daddy, while Corrine Koslo’s Big Mama captures both the humour and desperation in the wife who tries to keep peace in a family at war.

Sue LePage’s intentionally cramped set increases the production’s tension, not just by suggesting the action’s hothouse quality but also, because of its steep rake, by requiring Powell to hop around precariously on a crutch whenever he’s standing. The actor must get a real workout every performance.

jonkap@nowtoronto.com

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