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."
Advertisement
Ready for a new fight
BACKSTAGE
Tough, self-doubting, angry guy Terrence Howard brings all of his conflicting qualities to the boards.
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'
The role of Brick seems a natural fit for the 38-year-old actor who has proved adept at channeling restless anomie as he did as the emasculated director in "Crash" and the pimp loser in "Hustle & Flow," which brought him a best actor Oscar nomination. His seething sexuality and rage is here put at the service of a character whose "Brokeback"-like relationship with another jock, Skipper, haunts the play -- an aspect substantially watered down in the 1958 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
Allen, the actress-choreographer who is making her Broadway directorial debut with "Cat," says Howard's ability to convey "the conflicted emotions of a tortured soul" in his body of work convinced her that he could play Brick despite his lack of stage training. "I was not put off at all by that nor was anybody in the cast," she says. "I knew that he would come to the role without any preconceived notions. I call him my diamond in the rough. There have been days when Terrence has been frustrated. But he has dug very deep to uncover a character who is rather mysterious, gloriously so."
Howard says he was attracted to -- and challenged by -- the enigma of Brick, particularly his sexual ambiguity. "I chose this part to say those lines -- 'Why can't exceptional friendship, real, real deep friendship between two men, be respected as something clean and decent . . . ' -- because I think a man should be free to express affection for another man, to tell another man he looks beautiful," Howard says. "I've felt very intense, real closeness to a man before with no sexual overtones to it. But we live in a society with such hypocrisy and mendacity that you can't put your arm around your best friend without someone accusing you of being homosexual."
"Mendacity" -- the bald-faced lies that run as freely as liquor in the Pollitt family -- is the watchword of the play and, it would seem, the actor himself. Howard has been remarkably unguarded in the press about his personal life as well as his philosophical views, liberally quoting from the Bible, the mystic poet Khalil Gibran and any number of self-help psychological books.
As ambitious as he is, Howard holds himself at a certain reserve from the fame that he has achieved. Since 1998, he has lived quietly in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., a small town outside of Philadelphia. And instead of glorying in his position as one of the finest African American actors of his generation, he expresses a certain discomfort with the flash of the paparazzi bulbs and red carpet. Forget pimps. It's hard out there for an actor trying to nurture his pilgrim soul.
FEATURED
MORE:
Advertisement
