CRAWL SPACE: Daniel Thomas May as Brick (left) and Courtney Patterson as Maggie the Cat in Georgia Shakespeare
Georgia Shakespeare doesn’t program modern plays lightly, but Tennessee Williams’ 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels even more Shakespearean than some of the Bard’s own work. Where some of the playwright’s lauded contemporaries, such as Arthur Miller, age less gracefully, Williams’ best plays seem increasingly at home in the classical canon, as attested by the grand production of Cat directed by Jasson Minadakis.
In addition to its sturdy “Daddy’s dying — who’s got the will?” plot, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sets up an axis between three characters, each of whom could come from a different major literary tradition. “Big Daddy” Pollitt (Tim McDonough) looks like King Lear transplanted as a rich midcentury Mississippi farmer. Like Lear, Big Daddy succumbs to both a towering temper and the lies of his untrustworthy children. He also proves reckless in the disposal of his kingdom, “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the River Nile.” Cat takes place on the eve of Big Daddy’s massive 65th birthday party, and outdoor fireworks provide booming accompaniment to his most explosive speeches, like Lear raging against the tempest.
LIP SERVICE: Dr. Sugar (Joe Sykes, left) and Catharine (Kate Donadio) share some sweets.
When mental patient Catharine Holly declares “I just think I’m dreaming this. It doesn’t seem real,” she offers convenient advice on how to watch Suddenly, Last Summer.
The 1958 play qualifies as one of the weirdest in Tennessee Williams’canon. It’s the go-to work for detractors who want to decry the playwright’s penchant for overheated extremes of human behavior. When Suddenly touches on lobotomies and sexual predation, it’s just getting warmed up.Actor’s Express’ compelling production, directed by Melissa Foulger, implicitly suggests that audiences relinquish expectations for realistic roles developed in conventional, satisfying ways. It’s more rewarding to view Suddenly, Last Summer as Williams’ act of self-psychotherapy, energized with a kind of climactic cross-examination scene worthy of courtroom drama.
From the outset, Suddenly presents the stage as a mindscape’s dark jungle more than an everyday setting. Fronds hang over the set of a New Orleans mansion’s overgrown garden, full of Venus flytraps and other primordial life forms. Wealthy Mrs. Venable (Shannon Eubanks) explains to young Dr. Cukrowicz(Joe Sykes), aka Dr. Sugar about her beloved, fortyish son Sebastian. Mother and son had the kind of relationship Oedipus would envy. Mrs. Venable holds a grudge against Sebastian’s nubile cousin Catharine (Kate Donadio) for her “child’s” besmirched reputation and death at a tropical hellhole called Cabeza de Lobo, or “Wolf’s Head.” (Symbolism alert!)
In Ian Fleming’s famed James Bond novel, Auric Goldfinger declares “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” When I attended Sunday’s compelling, opening night production of Suddenly, Last Summer at Actor’s Express, I had to figure out of the play’s apparent connections to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were happenstance, or what.
I didn’t go looking for Wonka-flavored footnotes in Suddenly, Last Summer by any means. During the Catharine Holly (Kate Donadio)’s big speech at the end, she describes sinister street urchins following her and ill-fated poet Sebastian on the streets of Cabeza de Lobo. On a make-shift musical instrument, the creepy little people play music like a tuba “Oompa, oompa, oompa.” The “Oompas” recur until it’s hard not to think of the chorus of the Oompah-Loompah songs in the 1971 film.
I would have made the association and promptly forgotten it, until I realized that earlier, the play had a line nearly identical to Willy Wonka. At one point “Dr. Sugar” (Joe Sykes) lights the cigarette for Mrs. Venable (Shannon Eubanks), who says, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” In the movie, when Charlie Bucket gives the Everlasting Gobstopper back to Willy Wonka in his office, Gene Wilder murmurs, “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” a line not in the book.
Could Roald Dahl, who wrote the original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964, and its screen adaptation in 1971, have been twice quoting from the Tennessee Williams 1958 play? Or was it a coincidence?
