THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 12, 1995 TAG: 9501100119
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Theater review
SOURCE: MONTAGUE GAMMON III
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Memorable images dominate the production of ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' now on stage at the Little Theatre of Norfolk.
There are powerful images of a father embracing his son, and of that same father striking that same son to the ground. There is the image of a loving and voluptuous wife, sent sprawling by the drunken husband to whom she is devoted. There is the sight of a mother desperately holding her son, and there is an unforgettable vision of a lone performer, spotlighted and dominant.
There is, most frequently, the signature image of this play, the scantily clad form of Maggie the Cat. That role goes to Chelsie Raye Linquist, who stalks, slinks, prowls, parades, and poses through almost every scene like some elemental life force, or perhaps like a deadly succubus.
The more one considers Tennessee Williams' script, and this production of it, the more strongly the concept of the succubus, the demon who drains men of their vitality through sexual encounters, suggests itself. There is a predatory, voracious air that clings to everything Maggie does.
Like most of her fellow performers, Linquist represents an abstract force, or a symbol, more than she embodies a psychologically intricate character.
The superficialities of an actress's appearance are usually of little import to any real commentary upon a community production, but the dialogue does make much of Maggie's physical appeal. To call Linquist eye catching in her diaphanous slip is to call nitroglycerin in a tankcar a hazardous substance.
Yet it is not Linquist but Bob Burchette as Big Daddy who truly dominates the show. Patriarch of a contentious clan of rich Southerners, proprietor of a 28,000-acre plantation and possessor of another $10 million ``in cash and blue chip stocks,'' Big Daddy celebrates his 65th birthday as his family learns that he is terminally ill.
Burchette's character drips a raw and earthy vitality, the liveliest being in a play whose themes are vitality and fertility. Believable to the core, his performance has a strong element of the symbolic about it also. Lake Maggie, Big Daddy is the embodiment of a force as much as he is a person.
Listening to Burchette, one recognizes the power of Williams' dialogue and sees how the playwright achieved his lyric intensity without forfeiting a sense of realism. Williams turned the limited vocabulary of his unschooled characters into something close to poetry by nothing more intricate than an artful, masterly use of repetition.
Burchette is especially adapt with the rhythmical patterns thus created, his voice riding the rise and fall of the phrases like a stately sailing vessel on the crests of powerful seas.
Betty Brigman, as Big Mama, is a worthy partner for Burchette. One senses the gentle, loving young woman she had been, the strength it has taken to endure her long marriage to Big Daddy, and the reserve of will with which she may hold together, after he is gone, what he has built.
Brick, Maggie's young, alcoholic husband, is played by Monty Mason. Brick has very little to say for much of the play, and Mason has discovered the key to playing this man who tries to ignore or escape almost everything happening around him. Mason has realized that it is not enough just to avoid paying attention to Maggie and the others; Brick must seem to be focused on something that exists on some other plane of existence.
Leslie Draper directed. Draper is to be credited especially with the creation of those potent images, and with the show's strong sense of rhythm and verbal balance.
Other major cast members were James Mitchell as Brick's older brother Gooper and Connie J. Wakefield as Cooper's fecund wife Mae, Bob Hill as Dr. Baugh and Thomas Brugger as Reverand Tooker.
Draper also designed a good-looking set. by CNB