No playwright has capitalized on the dramatic power of a ruined birthday party quite like Tennessee Williams.
He won his first Pulitzer Prize for 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire , in which birthday girl Blanche DuBois is wished many unhappy returns by a plate- and nerve-shattering Stanley Kowalski.
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And he earned his second one for 1955's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , in which Big Daddy takes in a deep breath to blow out the candles on his cake and chooses to use it to berate his family at top volume instead.
This year, theatre's ultimate unbirthday boy turns 100 (may he rest in peace), and the Shaw Festival is celebrating the centenary with a new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof directed by Eda Holmes. It's a perfect present for audiences, filled with enough knock-your-socks-off moments that there's no need to keep the gift receipt.
The second act is just sensational. In it, Big Daddy - the Mississippi Delta's biggest cotton-planter - sets out to discover exactly what it is that has driven his beloved son Brick to hit the bottle, hard.
Big Daddy and Brick are complex characters, portrayed here with depth and style by superb actors of two generations: Jim Mezon and Gray Powell.
A former athlete, Brick hit a wall of depression after his football buddy Skipper - with whom he had a particularly close friendship - drank himself to death. Now he's following his friend's suit - and also abstaining from his marital duties with his increasingly sexually frustrated wife Maggie (Moya O'Connell).
Having just survived a cancer scare (he thinks), Big Daddy is a brute, full of cruel words for his wife Big Mama (Corrine Koslo) and lecherous looks for Maggie. But he has enormous affection for his son, and his hardscrabble past has given him tolerance of different ways of life (and disdain for middle-class morality).
As the two talk around the issue of Brick's relationship with Skipper, Mezon circles Powell, yanking him by his silk pyjamas every time he tries to escape his plantation bedroom. The love and loathing that pours out in this encounter is breathtaking and heartbreaking - pure theatrical bliss.
The acts that bookend Big Daddy and Brick's boxing match pale in comparison, partly due to the material, partly due to the execution. In the first section, also a pas de deux, Maggie is after Brick to reveal - or rather admit - the truth about the relationship with Skipper that has left him such a shipwreck. She also wants him back in the sack because she loves him - and wants to get pregnant to cement her claim on Big Daddy's "28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the Valley Nile."
While O'Connell certainly has the requisite sex appeal for Maggie, she comes across as more of an indoor, domestic cat than the metaphorical one of the title dancing on a piping pewter parapet. Her performance is multilayered, but too reined in - missing a certain madness or magnetism to properly propel Williams's poetic realism in her long, opening monologue. She and Powell are marvellous in the play's final moments, however, which Holmes has made surprisingly cathartic.
As Brick's brother Gooper and his scheming, incredibly fertile wife Mae, Patrick McManus and Nicole Underhay are excellent back-ups to the leads. Other supporting characters sporting silly Southern accents stick out, however. But the production's minor flaws are quickly forgotten, while the battle between Mezon's bull-like Big Daddy and Powell's wounded Brick is one for the books.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof runs at the Shaw Festival until Oct. 23.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
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