"Maggie the Cat Is Alive!"

By Richard Zoglin

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF; Showtime; August and September

Actors, like rock-'n'-roll singers, find something irresistible about a Southern accent. Those languid, drawling syllables just seem to make emotions sound bigger. That may be the least of the reasons why Tennessee Williams' plays have endured, but in the opening minutes of Showtime's new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it is the most obvious. (The production, part of the network's "Broadway on Showtime" series, premiered on Sunday and will repeat this Wednesday and on several dates next week and next month.) Jessica Lange, who stars as Maggie the Cat, leaps into her syrupy, Scarlett O'Hara cadences like an eight-year-old sloshing around in a mud puddle: "One of the no-neck mahn-stuhs messed up mah luv-ly lace dress." O.K., folks, one can almost hear her say, just watch me act.

And act she does. If Lange initially seems in danger of sinking in Southern quicksand, she soon gains her footing and brings one of Williams' most memorable roles to stunning life. Prancing, preening, snarling from a half-crouch that is alternately seductive and menacing, she is constantly in motion. "Maggie the Cat is alive!" she shrieks, and one has no trouble believing her. If there were still any doubts after her performance in the movie Frances, Lange here serves notice that she is an actress to be reckoned with.

Maggie, of course, is a focal point for one of Williams' perfervid, evocative (if dramatically a bit clumsy) explorations of Southern familial passions. Her husband Brick has taken to the bottle and thrown her out of bed in despondency over the death of his best friend and the specter of his own homosexuality. Their marital crisis reaches a boil at the birthday party of

Brick's father, "Big Daddy" Pollitt, who is unaware that he is dying of cancer. The illness has drawn his other son, Cooper, and daughter-in-law to the family mansion to try to win first place in line for his estate--"Twenty-eight thousand acres," as Big Daddy boasts, "of the richest land outside of the Valley Nile."

Interestingly, the production restores part of Williams' original final act and dispenses with some of the changes that Director Elia Kazan urged upon the playwright for the Broadway production. The net effect is to retain the beefed-up dimensions of Maggie and Big Daddy from Broadway, but to leave Brick, at the end, a little more stuck in what Williams describes as a "state of spiritual disrepair."

Otherwise, Director Jack Hofsiss (who staged The Elephant Man) has done little more than transfer the play cleanly to the small screen and keep our eyes riveted on the performers. In this case, that is enough. Though Tommy Lee Jones, as Brick, lacks the brooding charisma of Paul Newman in the 1958 movie version, he provides a rare sight: a Brick who actually looks and talks like the ex-football player he is supposed to be. (Jones was an all-Ivy, all-East offensive guard at Harvard in the 1960s.) Kim Stanley (who played Maggie in the 1958 London production of Cat) makes Big Mama a more sympathetically human figure than one has a right to expect. Only Rip Torn, as Big Daddy, seems miscast. He has the bluster but not the bombast of the aging tycoon, and his Southern accent contains a trace of irony that seems to emanate from the actor, not the character. This is a Medium-Size Daddy at best. Still, the play, and Lange, tower above the rest of an arid summer's TV offerings. --By Richard Zoglin