Email
Peter Diseth is Brick and Kate Costello is Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” opening next weekend at Albuquerque Little Theatre. (Courtesy of billy nguyen)
Rooted in the deep South in the mid-1950s, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is a historical play, but it’s also a contemporary drama.
Playwright Tennessee Williams captures the mid-20th century with patriarchs, plantations and women’s resulting roles while illuminating 21st-century themes like addiction, homosexuality and family lies and secrets, says director Denise Schulz.
“To me it is a historical play now. It was written in 1955 and it deals with the environment of the South in 1955. It really can’t be updated,” she says of the play she’s staging this month at the Albuquerque Little Theatre.
 |
||
|
If you go WHAT: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, April 12-28. Special Thursday performance at 8 p.m. April 25 WHERE: Albuquerque Little Theatre, 224 San Pasquale SW HOW MUCH: Adults $22; seniors 62 years and older $20; students 13 years and older through university age $18 and children 12 years and younger $10 ADVISORY: Play has profanity and adult themes |
|
|
But the truth of the characters, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and their relationships resonates today: “I like his characters. He writes three-dimensional, strong, dynamic women. Maggie is driven. She is a survivor. Most of Tennessee Williams’ women are survivors.”
Schulz, a longtime director and University of New Mexico professor emeritus who headed the Theatre and Dance Department before she retired after 29 years, says she wrote a paper about Williams’ women characters in graduate school and always has respected their depth.
The play hits adult themes of homosexuality and sexism harder than a 1959 screenplay adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman that had mostly removed them, Schulz says: “The screenplay was sanitized for the times and very different from the play.”
The play, set entirely in Maggie and Brick’s bedroom, develops from a secret that has soured the couple’s marriage. Maggie is desperately trying to make it right, while Brick prefers his alcoholic haze to looking at their relationship. The action revolves around Big Daddy, his health and his 65th birthday party and relatives conniving to upset the favored place Brick holds in Big Daddy’s esteem.
Although this is her first time directing at the Albuquerque Little Theatre, Schulz previously directed Kate Costello and Peter Diseth, who play main characters Maggie and Brick, while at UNM.
