NY Theater: Bway dissects the misery of women as wivesby Lucy KomisarFrom the 1950s to the present, views have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women. Or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages. Three Broadway plays that span those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal. One was written in the fifties and focuses on thwarted desire. The others, from the sixties and the present, are about sexual betrayal. The American works are about small-town Middle America: Mississippi and Oklahoma. They are Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County." The British revival is Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming," about working class London.  “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” set on a plantation in Mississippi cotton country, is explicitly about sexual desire, but its real theme of women trapped by their men and by their inability to have a life without men. First performed on Broadway in 1955, the play, directed by Debbie Allen, has an all-black cast, demonstrating, if that were necessary, that the play is about couples, not about rich Southern whites.
 Brick (Terrence Howard), the favorite son of the dominating and wealthy "Big Daddy" (the brilliant James Earl Jones), is not sleeping with wife Maggie (Anika Noni Rose). We don’t know whether that’s because he’s homosexual (as was author Williams) or if this former college football player is just consumed by guilt about the death of his jock friend with whom he had an unnamed close connection. And whose phone call he hung up on before the friend took his life. So, we get to see Maggie, played with grossly unseductive sensuality by Rose, fail in her attempts to seduce the terminally bored Brick.
We also see Big Daddy express loathing for the wife (Phylicia Rashad) he’s bedded for 40 years. No reason is proffered: Big Mama seems a kind enough lady, even likeable as portrayed by the very expressive Rashad, sincere in her concern for his welfare, and almost pathetic in her efforts to please him. But the decay of this family is represented by the cancer eating at Big Daddy's body. And with or without sex, bad male-female connections cause desperate unhappiness for two women trapped in relationships, because they have no independent lives of their own.  Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” staged in London and on Broadway in 1965, shifts the marriage paradigm. Here, curiously, the woman takes charge, and uses sex as a way of asserting power and perhaps as a weapon against her husband. Under director Daniel Sullivan, the poisonous interaction between the sexes is, if anything, more virulent.
The moral and physical decay of the family and its members is reflected in the shabby North London house, with holes in the wallboard and the destruction of even the patina of familiar niceties. Max (Ian McShane), the father, a violent, nasty, retired butcher, recalls his wife: “It made me sick to look at her rotten face.” His son Lenny (Raul Esparza), the horse player, ridicules him. Another son, Joey (Gareth Saxe), a boxer in training, is punch drunk.  Into that crumbling home comes the third son, Teddy (James Frain), who left nine years ago to be a professor of philosophy in the US, and Ruth (Eve Best), his wife. Teddy’s self-important remarks to Ruth seem to be attempts to assert his authority: “I took you there [to Italy]. I can speak Italian.”
But she’s about to ditch him and stay in London. She tells Lenny she was “a photographic model for the body” before she went away. Translation: she posed for a porn magazine. He proposes to set her up as a prostitute on Greek Street. Max warns, “She’ll use us, she’ll make use of us. I can smell it.” Pinter appears to be saying that she will turn the tables on these men by using sex as power, her power. It's certainly a change from the fifties, though not much more a brief for marriage than the sex-starved woman of Williams.  We come now to the present, to “August: Osage County” by Tracy Letts, in a steaming-hot small-town Oklahoma summer. Set in peaked roof clapboard house that represents the Main Street fantasy image of marriage, it tracks a family’s corrosive meanness that leaves bodies, souls and marriages all withering.
A spiteful foul-mouthed woman in her 70s (Deanna Dunagan) pops pills; her husband (Dennis Letts) drinks. She has cancer of the mouth, but there’s a cancer in the family, lack of caring; the couples are consumed by hostility. A Native American (Kimberly Guerrero) who is hired as a servant carries an amulet to protect her soul from this poisonous ambience.  One of three sisters, Barbara Fordham (Amy Morton) is separated from Bill, a professor (Jeff Perry), who was her husband for 23 years. Daughter Jean (Madeleine Martin) is a pot-smoking 14-year-old. Dad is sleeping with his students.
Barbara's overweight sister Mattie (Rondi Reed) spends her time heckling her laconic husband Charlie (Francis Guinan), who retreats behind a beer can. The only relationship in the family that appears to be based on real affection turns out to be incestuous. Under the direction of Anna D. Shapiro, the play comes perilously near to daytime TV melodrama in piling one disastrous personal relationship on another. Why don’t the wives get free and get out? More than a half a century after Maggie’s travails, Letts’ Middle American women are not very liberated. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Written by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Debbie Allen. Starring James Earl Jones, Terrence Howard, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Giancarlo Esposito, Lisa Arrindell Anderson, Lou Myers, Count Stovall. Sets by Ray Klausen; Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street. Tue 7pm; Wed - Sat 8pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm. Running time: 2:45. $61.50 - $96.50. 212-239-6200. http://www.cat2008onbroadway.com/ “The Homecoming.” Written by Harold Pinter. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Starring Eve Best, Raul Esparza, James Frain, Michael McKean, Ian McShane, Gareth Saxe. Sets by Eugene Lee. Costumes by Jess Goldstein. Cort Theatre. 138 West 48th Street. Tue 7pm; Wed - Sat 8pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm. Running time: 2:10. $26.50 - $98.50. 212-239-6200. “August: Osage County.” Written by Tracy Letts. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Starring Ian Barford, Deanna Dunagan, Kimberly Guerrero, Francis Guinan, Brian Kerwin, Michael McGuire, Madeleine Martin, Mariann Mayberry, Amy Morton, Sally Murphy, Jeff Perry, Rondi Reed, Troy West, Munson Hicks, Susanne Marley, Jay Patterson, Dee Pelletier, Molly Ranson, Aaron Serotsky, Kristina Valada-Viars. Setts by Todd Rosenthal. Costumes by Ana Kuzmanic. Steppenwolf Theatre Company at the Imperial Theatre. 249 West 45th Street. Tue - Sat 7:30pm; Wed & Sat 2pm; Sun 3pm. Running time: 3:15. $26.50 - $99.50. 212-239-6200. for “Cat” by Joan Marcus, for “Homecoming” by Scott Landis, for “August” by Joan Marcus. | 
