Review: Knoxville Theatre Club’s ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ a Force of Nature

Let’s go back to a time and place not of our own, but to the sweltering heat of a Mississippi Delta evening, where the slowly flowing surface of that wide river, the heavy scent of magnolia blossoms, and the decorum of house and habit struggle to disguise the secrets of the past. Director JP Schuffman brings us an absolutely stunning production of Southern playwright Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that attests to the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of futility, death, and anguish: “there’s nothing more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof.” 

Audiences were offered a folding fan in addition to their playbill in a cute nod to the world of the play (and to help with the heat of our own late August nights here in Tennessee.) I felt like such a southern belle fanning myself in the back row. We’re welcomed to an elaborately decorated stage stylized in the accoutrements of a wealthy plantation family; Schuffman, who also served as scenic and lighting designer, draped the stage in airy, creamy silks framing a massive picture window through which dreamy atmospheric lighting marks the evening’s descent into night. The set is a strange but perfect sort of surreal realism and captured beautifully Williams’s own description of the setting that should almost “dissolve mysteriously into the air.” The bed/sitting room in which the action takes place is dainty, realistic, and suggestive of one of the major themes in the play—innumerable glass bottles filled with various amounts of dark liquor line the low shelf that winds its way along the wall from one end of the stage to the other. It’s these little details, from a lone bed pillow left on the sofa to three glass decanters of that same brown liquor that are slowly made empty by the end of the show, that attest to the power of visual and physical storytelling that Schuffman so deftly wove into this production.

Sara Gaddis as Maggie was a powerhouse on stage, a fitting casting choice for one of the strongest and most powerful women characters in drama. Gaddis, in a production note in the playbill, says that Maggie “is a breeze until she becomes a tornado,” and Gaddis excelled in negotiating the tension, passion, and angst wound up within Maggie until she is forced to let it out. David Snow’s Brick was the perfect counterpoint to Gaddis’s Maggie with a fierce desperation hiding carefully behind the shadow of a carefully forced languidity. The mask is on, and we see it slipping, slipping slowly as Brick is forced to reckon with a family secret and the inevitable conjuring of a ghost from his past. Gaddis and Snow have both a physical and psychic chemistry that makes you fall in love with the both of them, especially when they’re at each other’s throats. 

Carol Goans was stellar as Big Mama; she brought me to tears not once but twice Friday night. Her Big Mama was a riot, ever so keen to please and entertain and perform the matronly duties of the household. She is desperate for Big Daddy’s love and approval, and you can see it even in Goans’ posture; the little—or not so little— cutting marks from Big Daddy absolutely deflate her. Her little hands fly here and there to fix a collar or a stray hair on her beloved Brick, the jingling of bracelets and necklaces and the little click of her heels as she shuffles across stage endear Big Mama to us, and when she is hurt, we are hurt, and it is tangible. Goans is absolute magic; Goans is Big Mama. Kevin Cannon’s Big Daddy, unfortunately, did not feel as powerful or commanding as the role requires; he needed to up the passion of his delivery, really command the stage and the actors in scenes with him, to make them feel smaller and even threaten their attempts to butt heads with him. He does a great job in working in elements of Big Daddy’s illness and weakness into his posture and carriage, but he really needs to try and fly off the handle a little bit more in the more intense scenes with Brick and Big Mama. He finally does work up to a crescendo towards Act III, but it is short lived. He needs to let some of his lines sit and stew, bubbling up into the barely contained anger that is nearly indistinguishable from Big Daddy’s “love.”

Raine Palmer and Greg Knox as Mae and Gooper Pollitt, respectively, were also fantastic together as Brick and Maggie’s brother and sister-in-law, the ideal nuclear family with five children and a sixth on the way. Both are a bit whiny in their delivery which is perfect characterization for these two who almost become antagonists by the end of the play. Palmer belies a jittering franticness beneath her bubbling charm and explodes in a confrontation with Maggie; while the audience laughed at this moment, I didn’t, because I was so rapt with Palmer’s jealousy and anger toward a family so obsessed with truth and the shame of lying. Knox is barely a presence in the beginning of the play, carefully concealing the younger Pollitt’s deftly-laid plan for Big Daddy’s inheritance. He commands the stage in the last act as a force of logic and truth, delicately balancing his compassion for Big Mama with his jealousy of playing second fiddle to Brick. Cadence Hayes as Doc Baugh and Jim Richardson as Reverend Tooker round out the adult cast, anxiously unsure of what to do with themselves and their roles in the night’s events—birthday party guests, bearers of bad news, professional guides, both waiting for the inevitable and unannounced moments when these roles will shift. Audrey McGuire, Ollie McGuire, and Brayden Phelps make up the “no-neck monsters” that are Mae and Gooper’s kids Trixie, Sonny, and Buster, who burst on stage in the most delightfully inopportune moments for comic relief. 

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof runs for two weeks until September 6, with showings on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7pm at the brand new Borderlands Playhouse inside the Borderlands Tees warehouse at 802 Sevier Avenue in South Knoxville. Tickets are available with flex pricing at https://knoxvilletheatreclub.org/tickets.