Terrence Howard is ready for a new fight
THEATER
The actor brings no stage experience to 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' Just an eagerness for something new.
NEW YORK — Agrin creeps across Terrence Howard's face as he intently cuts through the bandages on his right hand -- a souvenir of Brick, the sodden ex-jock he's playing in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." "I figured the media would be looking to hang me; people are always looking for somebody to fail," he says in his dressing room at the Broadhurst Theatre. "But I always tell directors, 'The role I want is the role I can't accomplish, the thing that's going to make me fail.' Every warrior is looking for that fight that he won't win. And I'm finding it."
Indeed, cutting through the gauze, Howard would resemble nothing more than a middleweight boxer between bouts. That is, were he not fighting off "the worst case of the flu in my life" and were he not still dressed in the cream-colored silk pajamas Brick wears throughout the play. The character long ago traded his football dreams for what his wife, Maggie, calls "the charm of the defeated," a liquor bottle his only escape from the disgust he feels for the greed rampant at the plantation of his blustering Southern Gothic family.
The revival, directed by Debbie Allen, features an all African American cast that includes James Earl Jones as patriarch Big Daddy, Phylicia Rashad as his long-suffering wife and Anika Noni Rose ("Dreamgirls") as the titular cat in heat, Maggie. The production has already racked up a $4-million advance, fueled by the presence of Jones and Howard, whose high-profile Broadway debut comes despite the fact that he has not even an iota of stage experience.
The limited-run revival, which was slated to close on April 15, recently announced a two-month extension. But Howard, in order to fulfill a previous commitment, as pilot Jim Rhodes in the film "Iron Man," will be on hiatus from April 15 to May 22.
The production follows two other hits with strong appeal to the African American community: the 2004 revival of "A Raisin in the Sun" and 2005's "The Color Purple." The production design and costuming are intentionally fudged, given the un- likelihood that a black family would have shared circumstances similar to the Pollitts in the Mississippi of the 1950s.
'Diamond in the rough'
