PRODUCTION OF CLASSIC 1955 PLAY
IN CITY’S STATION NORTH DISTRICT
IS METAPHOR FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

By Alan Z. Forman

Baltimore was a divided segregated city when Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” debuted on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.

Blacks could not eat at public lunch counters in Charm City (and elsewhere in America) and didn’t venture into upscale Guilford or even lowly Hampden. Residents of Polish descent confined themselves to Highlandtown and Canton; Jews were not allowed in Roland Park. Italians lived in Little Italy.

People of color didn’t mix with whites except to work for them.

Downtown Baltimore was lily white. Department stores had “colored” restrooms; Read’s (the predecessor of Rite-Aid) had segregated lunch counters. City Hall was a Caucasian enclave.

Public schools, suddenly desegregated by federal statute after 1954, were still divided racially, ethnically and by religion. It was highly unusual to see mixed-race couples anywhere in town.

Minorities kept to themselves, remaining in their own neighborhoods, shopping areas and hangouts. Races and ethnicities didn’t mix; blacks did not hang out with whites. Not in restaurants, not in movie theaters, not in stores.

And not in government.

It was even more pronounced in other parts of the South, the deep South.

SIGNS UNSEEN IN BALTIMORE

In Key West Florida, for example, where playwright Williams spent most of his leisure time in those days, there were “colored restrooms” and separate public drinking fountains as late as the late 1950s, so designated by signs unseen in Baltimore.

With at least one exception:  Mt. Washington’s Meadowbrook Swim Club in the late 1940s displayed a sandwich board on the Kelly Avenue Bridge proclaiming, “No dogs or Jews”; it didn’t need to specify no blacks — that was understood.

There were codicils in Roland Park deeds that forbade the sale of properties to blacks and Jews.

In North Carolina, Virginia and the deep South, African-Americans were required to sit in the backs of buses and streetcars, although not in Maryland other than the Eastern Shore.

But in the half-century since, all that has changed, and Charm City, despite its many current problems, has integrated reasonably well, now segregated economically but not racially or ethnically. Minorities have become a fixture in virtually all parts of town.

RACIAL MIX VIRTUALLY UNNOTICED

So well in fact that audiences viewing Williams’ play at the Load of Fun Theater in the old North Avenue Market last weekend in the city’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District barely noticed, if at all, that the cast was racially mixed, that the parents of two white brothers were portrayed by black actors, that the patriarch of an upscale Southern family in the segregated 1950s was played by an African-American Baltimorean.

Percy W. Thomas, dean for external programs at Sojourner-Douglass College and artistic director of Heralds of Hope Theater, which produced the play — advertised as “a color-blind production of the Pulitzer Prize winning tale” — in concert with the Theatrical Mining Company, nearly stole the show as Big Daddy Pollitt, Williams’ doomed patriarch of a wealthy Mississippi Delta family who is dying of colon cancer but doesn’t know it because he’s been lied to by everyone around him.

Kicked in the ass, as it were, under the guise of being kind.

It’s his birthday and they’ve told him he isn’t dying at all, that he has a clean bill of health and can expect to live for many years, that nothing needs to change — to make him happy while they plot their inheritance of his fortune.

THE ‘BALTIMORE LIE’

Not unlike what some would call the “Baltimore lie,” the insistence of city elders that Charm City is doing just fine and that government should keep on doing what it’s doing. That nothing needs to change in Baltimore.

That Grand Prix races are good for the city, and a highly unpopular bottle tax which mostly benefits Baltimore County — to the city’s detriment — should be increased. That the reelected city government — incumbents all, with only two exceptions — will somehow perform even better this time around.

Mendacity, to use the word and theme of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”: lies and liars.

Or is it?

The family members who deceive Big Daddy are played by actors so effective in their roles it’s virtually impossible not to see them as the actual characters they are portraying.

PROVERBIAL CAT ON THE HOT TIN ROOF

The lead female character, Maggie, the proverbial cat on the hot tin roof who can’t, or won’t, jump off to escape the heat, played by local actress Lauren Blackwell, exudes so much sexuality she literally detours her alcoholic husband, Big Daddy’s younger son Brick, from whatever homosexual tendencies he may be experiencing — an accomplishment that would be vehemently denied by the national gay community.

Yet when she lies to her father-in-law in hopes of gaining his inheritance for herself and husband Brick, Blackwell’s Maggie is so sympathetic a character she can almost be forgiven for her indiscretion and coquettish behavior.

It matters not in 2011 Baltimore that she is black and her husband white. Nor is it significant that her husband’s brother and sister-in-law are played by whites, portrayed to perfection by Raina Dewald and Warren Watson, and that his mother is beautifully — and sympathetically — played by Penny S. Demps, an African-American graduate of Morgan State University.

Not since James Earl Jones famously portrayed Big Daddy with an all-black cast in 2008 has American theater appeared so innovative.

DIRECTED BY BARRY FEINSTEIN

Under the superb direction of Barry Feinstein, a fixture in Baltimore community theater for over 35 years, integration reigns supreme in what was once a provincial southern town, a Maryland city with the positive sensibilities of the deep South which now embraces the best of racial equality, at least as that exists anywhere in America.

^[2]But what is dealt with in this play has naught to do with race. The play’s about mendacity: lies and liars.

And therein lies the Baltimore rub, the Charm City Contradiction, the Mendacity in Maryland. This city, for all its successful integration is still considered by a large percentage of its population — some 70 percent of which is black — to have a segregated Southern-town mentality, and that despite its electoral dominance by African-Americans, its institutions are nonetheless controlled and run by whites.

CITY OFFICIALS REELECTED TWO WEEKS AGO

The city’s fourth black mayor was reelected just two weeks ago, along with an African-American City Council president and comptroller; and eight of 14 City Council members are black.

Yet many blacks allege the mayor is dominated if not totally “controlled” by Maryland’s governor, or so they say, and what they term the “white political establishment”; that the police commissioner is Caucasian and the department’s hierarchy is controlled by whites, and that most of the mayor’s other top aides, deputies, spokespersons and department heads are also white.

Still the city’s institutions claim equality. And maybe they are equal?

And maybe not.

Like Maggie the Cat and homosexual? husband Brick they are enigmas, appearing one way to some, another way to others. Mendacious? maybe; totally truthful? probably not.

SLEPT WITH HUSBAND’S BEST FRIEND

Maggie, for her part, professes undying love for the alcoholic Brick, who is well played by Michael Page, yet confesses having slept with his best friend out of revenge, who subsequently committed suicide after an apparent (or suggested?) homosexual encounter with Brick.

Plus she is not above openly flirting with her father-in-law Big Daddy, writhing and undulating in clothing reminiscent of the persona of Marilyn Monroe, an icon of gay males who are known to revere the late actress’s style and unabashed sexuality.

Big Daddy tells Brick he’s “always hated” his offsprings’ mother, Big Mama, and now that he’s (mendaciously) been given a clean bill of health, he intends to find himself a “choice woman” so he can “smother her with furs and choke her with diamonds.”

In several scenes he openly ogles Maggie, who obliges his unabashed leers by posturing provocatively and running her hands over her hips while wearing a tight Marilyn Monroe-style bright red dress.

LOVED MAGGIE THE CAT AND MONROE

In Key West years ago the playwright Williams, who himself was openly gay and alcoholic, told the future Voice of Baltimore that “Cat” was his personal favorite of all his plays and that he loved the Maggie character and Marilyn Monroe.

Yet Monroe was never cast in any of his plays or films. The young, exceptionally beautiful Elizabeth Taylor played Maggie in a 1958 film version opposite Paul Newman’s Brick, with Burl Ives recreating his Broadway role of Big Daddy.

Other Tennessee Williams women of that era included four-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Katharine Hepburn; Jane Wyman, former wife of President Ronald Reagan; Vivien Leigh, who won a 1951 Oscar for her portrayal of Williams’ Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” opposite a young Marlon Brando; and Tallulah Bankhead, whose last theatrical performance, five years before the end of her life, in Williams’ “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” previewed at Baltimore’s old Ford’s Opera House Theatre on Fayette Street in 1963 before moving on to a less than successful Broadway run in January 1964.

Williams had difficulty settling on the Big Daddy character and famously feuded with the play’s original director, Elia Kazan, who cast Ives — a folk singer and inexperienced actor at the time — in the role, much to the chagrin of Williams, who Kazan then forced to rewrite the play’s third act to beef up the role after Ives proved such a standout while the play was in rehearsal.

TOO POWERFUL TO DIE OFFSTAGE

Kazan insisted Big Daddy was too powerful a character to die offstage in the last act, as Williams had originally conceived the play.

The drama was constantly revised by Williams over the years, alternately deleting and restoring dialogue, unable to settle on a single focus for the lies and liars. The version currently running at the Load of Fun Theater is Kazan’s original Broadway production, which has Big Daddy reappearing in the third act in his bedclothes, and restores the sexual innuendos that were muted in the 1958 film version.

Williams scholars and theatergoers alike generally agree that the best adaptation on film is the one produced in 1985 that stars Jessica Lange in the role of Maggie, with Tommy Lee Jones as Brick and Rip Torn as Big Daddy.

Williams’ couples, the men as well as the women, leave the audience wondering why a reasonably sane person would ever want to get married. And if the point isn’t driven home by their mutual hostility, there is the comic relief of the “No-Neck Monsters” — children of Brick’s elder brother Gooper and wife Mae — to seal the deal.

NO NECKS = NO SEPARATION

In describing the in-laws’ children in this way, Maggie notes that the kids appear to have heads that blend right into their bodies, without benefit of necks, that there is no separation between mind and body, between truth and fiction, between lies and liars.

Unfortunately at the performance attended by Voice of Baltimore, the obnoxious children did not physically appear, their stage mother having failed to deliver them to the theater, according to Director Feinstein, who was unable to provide a better reason for the characters’ absence onstage.

Other minor characters, a clergyman and a doctor, were nicely played by Chris Elliott and Archie D. Williams.

Feinstein is the artistic director of the Theatrical Mining Company and recently won the Baltimore Playwrights Festival’s first-place production award; 30 years ago he directed Big Daddy Percy Thomas in James Baldwin’s “Blues for Mr. Charlie” to great critical acclaim.

THE BEST OF COMMUNITY THEATER

He personifies the best of Baltimore community theater.

Brick is the only character in the play able or willing to tell Big Daddy the truth — but not till after he gets very drunk. In Williams’ Mississippi Delta world, the use of alcohol is thus equated with truth.

Brick drinks to activate what he describes as the “click” in his head, the switch that enables him to turn off the lies and liars and live with the people and the life that he’s been dealt.

It enables him to see and tell the truth in the face of mendacity, which reigns supreme, where everyone lives the lie.

In Baltimore, in the new millennium, it’s not as easy to see the truth. Or to switch off the mendacity and the lie.

Or to determine which is which.

alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org

“CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF” CONTINUES ITS RUN THROUGH NOV. 27th AT LOAD OF FUN  (click here) ^[3]  and  (here) ^[4]  for tickets (and directions to the theater).