Alone on stage for what seems like an eternity, talking and undressed, Susan Riley Stevens is such a strident Maggie, no wonder Brick fails to succumb to her charms. Her sexiness doesn't last as long as the haranguing that diminishes her anguish. Jay Stratton's Brick is pretty one-note too. We get no sense of his longing for a relationship that represented purity, although we do finally see his disgust at how it's been torn at or lacking by everyone in his family, Maggie above all. But neither Stevens or Stratton make us care.
In this static production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the stars are Sharon Spelman, especially, as a realistic Big Mama, strangely powerful, and John Arnold who takes the stage with the same tenacity as Big Daddy took his grand rich acreage. In both we recognize how compelling Brick must have been before he hit bottle and bottom. In a family that's as dysfunctional as they come, the grabbing son Gooper seems almost amiable - at least as Patrick James Clarke interprets him (of course, he's a lawyer). Wisely, Tessie Hogan plays his baby-factory wife Mae with no poetic subtext. My, how they do all wander in and out of Maggie and Brick's bedroom, like a not-so-grand Central-Station, rather than just an obvious metaphorical reminder of the challenge to Maggie. Without it, we might forget she's the protagonist. Or is she?
With so much talk, talk, talk, and so little action, we're mired in concerns we don't share about mendacity, who has it, why that's important, and what will be the outcome. Some of those around me had already left the swamp before the final bedding, by which time I was already half asleep.
