TENNESSEE WILLIAMS won a Pulitzer Prize for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which premiered in 1955. Three years later, the film version starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor became one of the top-ten grossing films of the year. The play hasn’t stopped drawing crowds since.  A complex set piece about mendacity, Williams used numerous parallel plots to weave a web of acrimony around the Pollitt family.  In the right hands, it packs a wallop.  In the wrong hands, as is the case with Greg Kramer’s production at the Segal Centre, the play can turn into a bit of a mess.

The play portrays a generational conflict against the decline of the Old South.  Tennessee Williams was a professed admirer of Anton Chekhov, and so Cat on a Hot Tin Roof unfolds like an Southern variation on The Cherry Orchard, with Big Daddy and his plantation standing in for the Ranevskaya family and their cherry trees.  Both plays are deliberate examinations of the decline of the aristocratic families in the face of a changing society.

Big Daddy, the archetypal self-made man of the Old South has pulled himself out of the boxcars of his childhood and into the riches of cotton farming. He’s dying of cancer – a modern way to go if there ever was one. Roiling underneath this genteel simplicity of his Tennessee plantation, the next generation of Pollitts is jostling for position.  The pressure’s on Brick, the favoured son, to step up and show he’s worthy of inheritance.  In the wings, eldest son Gooper and his wife Mae are popping out babies and legal arguments to solidify their grasp on the family line.

Questions of family only distract a forlorn Brick from his true conflict, the grand secret of his homosexuality, which he tries to drink numb.  Of course, it doesn’t help that his wife Maggie’s eyes are firmly glued to her father-in-law’s estate.  Beyond the alcoholism, Brick and Maggie don’t get along.  He thinks she pushed his best friend (or gay lover) Skipper to suicide some years back.  She thinks he won’t sleep with her to withhold the child they need to solidify their claim on the inheritance.  Maggie needs to resolve her husband’s homosexuality, save her marriage, conceive a child, and fend off her in-laws all before Big Daddy dies.  Suffice it to say she’s under a lot of pressure.   “What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?” Brick asks his wife Maggie early on.  “Just stayin’ on it, I guess,” she replies, “As long as she can.”

That’s a whole lot of conflict for a play to resolve.  And so the success of any production comes from a director prioritizing the interweaving plot lines so that the audience – not to mention the actors – clearly understands how everything lines up.  It’s a juggling act.  Unfortunately, despite an impressively decadent set by John C. Dinning and extravagant costuming by James Lavoie, this is where Greg Kramer’s production begins to unravel.

The central problem is the portrayal of Brick’s homosexuality.  Kramer minimizes then flatly eliminates this integral ingredient of the plot in order to shift the emphasis off Brick and toward his wife Maggie, the play’s supposed cat.  By ruling out a gay Brick, all we’re left with is a drunken ex-football player who won’t sleep with his wife. Skipper is Brick’s invisible foil, the source of his alcoholism, his angst and, ultimately, his sympathy.  Without the backdrop of a gay love affair, there’s only a diminished secret left for Brick to deny, which effectively robs his character of purpose and tragedy.  It doesn’t help matters that Todd Sandomirsky, who plays Brick, is already aimless, a weak actor who offers a void of personality in the place of existential absence.

Around this limited and decidedly un-gay Brick, Maggie and Big Daddy are forced to overcompensate.  Severn Thompson (Maggie) is a fiery and seductive actress, but without a husband pining for another man, the audience really has no reason to sympathize with her marriage or financial ambitions.  On the other hand, Barry Flatman’s Big Daddy brims with so much unbridled anger that he begins to make you wonder if sticking around for his money if even worth it. Sharon Bakker’s Big Mama is left tiptoeing around the edges of his torrential abuse.  Paula Jean Hixson (Mae) and Bill Croft (Gooper) offer understated and cautious performances on a stage spilling over with outsized personalities. In the end, a play that is otherwise built on Williams’ trademark subtlety and symbolic gesture is blunted by unbalanced character portrayals.

The beauty of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof comes from the sly and underhanded interaction that everyone engages in while fighting off the inevitable decline of an era.  On their large plantation, the Pollitts, like Chekhov’s Ranevskayas, block out a world where the Mason-Dixon line is fading away and the cotton-picking trade is slowly being dragged down with the slavery it lived on. They can’t afford to think too far ahead because the future, weighs on them, doesn’t really include them. Too bad, then, that Kramer’s vision of the Pollitts doesn’t afford this lot many chances to effectively interweave their personal predicaments.