Dahlia Legault is back. This hugely talented actress is playing Maggie the Cat in Tampa Rep’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it’s a performance that’s so persuasive, you have to imagine a grateful Williams applauding from the afterworld.
Legault’s Maggie is convincingly vain, obstinate, calculating, a beautiful survivor who intends to outlast her husband’s scorn for her, and to inherit her father-in-law’s millions even if her partner disdains them. So husband Brick won’t have sex with her? Well she’ll have her carnal embrace — and the pregnancy that can assure her a place in Big Daddy’s will — by hook or by crook. Watching Legault share the stage with the excellent Nathan Jokela as strung-out, contemptuous Brick, we’re reminded of other dysfunctional theater marriages, from Euripides’ Jason and Medea to Edward Albee’s George and Martha. In every case, the two partners are dangerously well-matched, unscrupulous, unrelenting. And unlike Medea and Martha, Maggie still has her ripeness. Not least among the reasons Legault’s performance works so well is its simmering sensuality.
Which is not to say that Maggie is the true center of the play. That distinction belongs to Brick, who, as Jokela helps us realize, has a more complicated set of problems than anyone else on Big Daddy’s plantation. After all, it’s Brick whose recognition that he’s been living in a world of lies has brought him to alcoholism, and it’s Brick whose one good relationship — with his best friend Skipper — has ended with Skipper and Maggie’s treachery, with Skipper’s death, and with unwanted suggestions that the two men were lovers. Add Brick’s despair at no longer being able to play pro sports, a lost job and a broken ankle, and you have a character who, intellectually inclined, might feel a little, shall we say, philosophical. But Brick isn’t cerebral: he reacts to his shattered world with a drink and a sneer, and a despair so wide, it makes him forget Big Daddy’s 28,000 acres. If Tampa Repertory Theatre’s two earlier Williams productions (Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire) suffered from not having male actors as strong as their female counterparts, this production shines in deploying Jokela against Legault. With antagonists so closely matched, anything can happen, anyone might throw the final, decisive punch.
The play takes place on Big Daddy’s birthday, and the clan, including brothers Brick and Gooper and their families, have gathered to pay homage to the rich old uninhibited bastard, who may or may not be dying of cancer. His chief concern, though, is that his golden boy, favorite son Brick, has turned into a leaden lush; can’t this transformation be reversed, he wonders? But in a world so unpromising, so devoid of moral purpose, the question isn’t why Brick’s an alcoholic; the question is why all the others aren’t as well.
The supporting cast is strong. Jim Wicker as Big Daddy is toweringly mean-spirited, notably in pain even as he crudely celebrates his ostensible health, and Jeanne M. Adams as Big Mama is clueless and transparent, apparently still shocked by her husband’s callousness even though she’s put up with it for decades. Ami Sallee as Gooper’s wife Mae is delightfully devious, and Jason Vaughan Evans as Gooper is incorrigibly petty. C. David Frankel’s direction is impeccable, as are Frank Chavez’s costumes and Keith Arsenault’s lighting. Amanda Bearss’ minimal set isn’t much to look at, but does the job.
Williams wrote only one great play after this one —The Night of the Iguana— so now Tampa Rep has brought us three of the playwright’s four masterpieces. Kudos to that theater for taking on this important series. And kudos to the actors — Legault and Jokela first among them — for doing this agile and shrewd feline justice.