Still sees well in the dark

Scheming women never go out of style.

Fifty years after playwright Tennessee Williams nabbed a Pulitzer and a Drama Critics Award for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his tale of a family riven by jealousy, illness, deceit, greed, liquor and sex seems as au courant as last fall’s political smears and nearly as juicy as prime-time television.

Except, of course, that in these debauched days of puerile imagination and craftlessness, the actors on TV wear fewer clothes and the dialogue stinks.

Big Daddy, an indecently wealthy cotton plantation patriarch suffering from widely metastasized cancer, has been told that his ailment is trifling. While he plans a resurgence of managerial and sexual power, his would-be heirs (who know the truth) plot to feature prominently in his as-yet-unwritten will. The favorite son, Brick, a former football star, has lapsed into alcoholism after the death of the man who was his best friend and teammate — and possibly his lover. Brick has shunned his wife since her one-night stand with the decedent, a tryst triggered by the friend’s need to prove he wasn’t gay. Consequently, the pair are childless, a real deficit in the inheritance sweepstakes which wife Maggie (aka “the cat”) is hot to win.

Meanwhile, the less-favored brother has walked the straight and narrow, fathered five (with another bun in the oven), and has a wife even more hell-bent on nabbing the paterfamilias’ millions.

The fiery interplay of faded passion, deceit and shameless scheming is compressed into one evening, with all the action taking place in Brick and Maggie’s bedroom, no small feat of dramaturgy.

Cat is unusual in that three versions were published with the author’s imprimatur, offering directors and stage companies a smorgasbord of language and climaxes from which to choose. Before the first production, director Elia Kazan persuaded Williams to rewrite the third act, to make Maggie a more sympathetic character and to bring Big Daddy back to the stage. (In the original, Big Daddy’s third act “appearance” was limited to an agonized offstage scream.)

Almost 20 years later, the playwright revisited the script and, among other changes, stripped out the n-word and stirred in some f-words — the civil-rights movement and the release of Nixon’s White House tapes, which rendered the foulest of language quasi-presidential, having changed societal sensibilities. But the core story remained untouched, still populated by Williams’ human universals. A theatergoer may well see friends, neighbors — family? — in Cat‘s tin dance.

Asheville Community Theatre Director Leslie Muchmore has chosen to stage the third version and told Xpress, “This was the last one that Williams himself came up with, and I wanted to do that. This is a very Southern play from an era rife with political hot buttons that can be difficult to deal with.”

Marketing, though, should be less of a problem. Williams had an incontrovertible talent for selecting titles — which another master of staging, Jimmy Buffett, has observed to be the most imperative step in selling a creative product. Consider “Margaritaville” and The Glass Menagerie, “Havana Daydreamin'” and The Night of the Iguana, “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and A Streetcar Named Desire — the names pull you in, even without knowing the content, and then enter the language. “Cat on a hot tin roof” has been used in dozens of pop songs by artists ranging from Nazareth to Gilbert O’Sullivan to Gino Vanelli to Bonnie Tyler to Snoop Dogg– a pungent metaphor for a ticklish, difficult, uncomfortable situation.

Asheville Community Theatre (35 E. Walnut St.) presents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Friday, Jan. 19, through Sunday, Feb. 4. Friday- and Saturday-night shows start at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. $20/general, $18/seniors, $10/students. 254-1320.