STAGE REVIEW : Ferocious ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Prowls Southland

For all the earned and unearned mystique that surrounds Tennessee Williams a mere half-dozen years after his death, his best work seems only to be getting better. Perhaps because the faded ferocity of his genteel world is beginning to seem otherworldly. Perhaps because there are so few 21-carat poets of the theater left among us--and the ones we have speak another, newer language.

Whatever. A yeasty Seattle Rep production of Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof� has come to town to make the point. The show paused at Pepperdine University’s Smothers Theatre Wednesday and Thursday on a swing through Western states; it plays tonight and Sunday in Palm Desert and Palos Verdes, respectively.

It is distinguished by rich Southern flavor, strong direction and heady casting fired up by at least two superlative key performances: that of Barbara Dirickson as the feline Maggie and William Biff McGuire as the ruthless Big Daddy.

This tale of mendacity and greed at the heart of a divided Mississippi Delta family thrives on regurgitated truths and hemorrhaging egos.

The excuse for this high-pitched and unsavory family reunion is the party celebrating the 65th birthday and supposed clean bill of health of Big Daddy (McGuire), the family’s relentlessly brutal patriarch. But rancorous Big Daddy is dying of cancer and wishes he could take his millions and his 28,000-acre plantation with him rather than leave them with his survivors.

His wife is an airhead, one son is a fool, the other, whom he favors, is a drunk. What’s a tyrant to do?

Williams uses the course of this sultry evening for a string of confrontations, confessions and revelations that peel away at a tangle of exposed nerves and vulgarly avaricious intentions. This is Southern Gothic at its spiciest, with an ending that’s a bit too chastened to ring true.

Rep director Mary Robinson has chosen to use a pre-Broadway version of Act Three, which lies somewhere between the original and the softer Broadway revision. But Brick’s seeming accession to Maggie’s advances at the closing curtain still rings false.

We’re talking of a virtual moment, however, and everything up to that point is sterling (except for some verbal--or acoustical?--mushiness; you cannot speak too softly in these halls).

Robinson’s clear reading of the play is aptly shrill and harsh. Dirickson’s Maggie picks up on the character’s self-description as “hard, cruel and frantic,� delivering a performance that’s tough as nails and becomes almost as grating to us in its persistent railing as it is to taciturn husband Brick.

As Brick, Stephen Pelinski has the right athletic looks and stony face. The role is thanklessly reactive, but he and Dirickson achieve such a high level of toxicity between them that it makes such reaction easier--and the final reconciliation even harder to accept.

John Procaccino’s Gooper and Marianne Owens’ Mae are stamped with the universal hallmarks of pious nerds--small, diligent people with a large appetite for malice and a duplicitous spirit.

Big Mama suffers a tad at the hands of Eve Roberts, who cannot adequately suppress her own intelligence to convey the stolid huff and puff of this giddy, lumbering woman. But she does compensate by delivering the right ferociousness in her more indignant moments. John Aylward and Woody Eney round out the company as the more peripheral Reverend Tooker and Doctor Baugh, respectively.

Designer Jess Goldstein has provided a creamy array of Southern summer costumes, and Ralph Funicello has devised an ample, high-ceilinged antebellum bedroom to complement them, well-lit by Craig Miller and Rick Paulsen.

Two more Southern California performances remain: At the McCallum Theatre, 73000 Fred Waring Drive in Palm Desert, today only, 8 p.m. $14-$23; (619) 340-ARTS--and at the Norris Theatre, Crossfield Drive at Indian Peak Road in Palos Verdes, Sunday only, 7 p.m. $27.50; (213) 544-0403.