Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Excaliber Shakespeare Company of Chicago, at Pulaski Park. This troupe’s always provocative color-blind casting aside, director Darryl Maximilian Robinson plays Williams’s quintessential tale of family dysfunction and emotional impotence fairly straight. Perhaps too straight. Though Robinson does a good job of locating the play’s humor, this staging barely scratches the work’s surface, nailing the obvious tensions between the characters but missing most of the underlying mind games: when Maggie and Brick argue over whether to have a baby, it seems more a simple quarrel than an epic battle of wits. Which is a shame, since the cast–especially Drew Nye and Khristian Leslie as brothers Brick and Gooper Pollitt–generally do a solid job of portraying these thick-skulled, obsessive-compulsive southerners.
