'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ opens March 19

By Pamela Dyer-Smith
Theatre Arts

Blake Ellis (Brick) and Kimberly Wood (Maggie)

"Cat On A Hot Tin Roof," the Tennessee Williams' play which - like his "A Streetcar Named Desire" - won the rare double accolade of the Pulitzer Prize and the NewYork Drama Critics Circle Award, will be the next play at Fresno State 's University Theatre from March 19-27.

Kathleen McKinley directs Kimberly Wood and Blake Ellis as the restless "cat" and the alcoholic husband she nearly doomed and then struggles to rescue.  The drama held New York audiences breathless for 86 weeks in its original production and was triumphantly revived on Broadway with Charles Durning as Big Daddy and Kathleen Turner as Maggie in 1990.

Daniel More will portray "Big Daddy," the wealthy cotton planter. His home, on what he boasts are "8,000 acres of he richest land this side of the valley of the Nile ," is the setting of the play.

Tennessee Williams has described this play as dealing "with human extremities of emotion." Against his favorite background of the Mississippi Delta region he told about members of a family who have been lying to each other, and are all brought harshly to face the truth.

Maggie, "the cat," is the one member of the family trying desperately to claw her way to the truth - chiefly the truth as to why her handsome, pensive, ex-athlete husband refuses to make love to her and has turned into an alcoholic.  She believes it is not because he has "lost his game" but because he has just quit playing.  She tells him that he has the charm of defeated people, but she doesn't have that charm because her hat is still in the ring, and she's determined to win.  She calls herself a restless cat on a hot tin roof because she's consumed with longing for love and envy of other women who have children.

She is able to skirt the truth of her husband's listless disintegration.  It stems, she says, from the suicide of his best friend with whom he had wanted to keep up a collegiate sense of being "team-mates forever," after their football years were over.

But it is the hard-driving father of this melancholy young man, while eagerly seizing upon a lie about himself, who is able to draw out the truth form his son, who claims he has taken up the bottle out of "disgust with mendacity."  In a searing scene the father forces the son to face the fact that it is really disgust with himself for having turned away from his friend when he was most needed, out of fear that the pure friendship they had was subject to an impure interpretation.

In return, the bitter son says "All right, you told me, I'll tell you," and her blurts out to his father what his doctor and everyone else has been trying to conceal - that his is dying of cancer.

Interwoven in the engrossing story of a father, son and daughter-in-law struggling for truth and survival are strands of the greed of another son and his wife for the old man's inheritance that they foresee is soon to fall, and the plaintive search for acceptance, after 40 years of marriage, of the old man's garrulous wife.

Andriana Cisneros (Big Mama) will be seen in the role of this wife who is unable to accept the medical verdict about her husbands approaching doom.  Others in the cast will include CJ Dion (Grooper) and Sara Jane Katen (Mae) as the avaricious older son and his wife, Ben Parks (Dr. Baugh) as the doctor who is persuaded to lie about big Daddy's condition, Jacob Savala (Rev. Tooker) as the preacher obsesses with a bequest form the dying man's estate, and Brandon Linder and Kirstie Hettinga (Lacey and Sookey) as plantation servants.

Caution:  Adult Situations and Language

Performance dates are March 19-20 and 23-27 at 8 p.m. and March 21 at 2 p.m.   All performances are in the Arena Theatre located in the Speech Arts Building on the campus of Fresno State.

Tickets, which now can be purchased online at http://www.csufresno.edu/Theatre , are $7 for Fresno State students, $12 for Fresno State faculty/staff, seniors, members of the Alumni Association, and Students at Other Schools, and $14 General Admission.

For more information, call the Theatre Box Office at 278-2216.