Triad Stage brings to life Tennessee Williams’ Southern gothic play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
By Bruce Buchanan Special to Go Triad
GREENSBORO — Since the theater company’s beginning, Triad Stage has had close association with the works of Tennessee Williams.
The first play Triad Stage ever produced was Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” in January 2002. Since then, Triad Stage has presented “A Streetcar Named Desire,” (2005), “The Night of the Iguana” (2008), “The Glass Menagerie” (2010) and “Kingdom of Earth” (2013).
That tradition is continuing with Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” tells the story of a wealthy Mississippi family whose lives revolve around a complex web of lies and secrets. Broadway actress Christina DeCicco plays Maggie, the family’s daughter-in-law. Much of the play focuses on Maggie and her husband, Brick.
Growing up on Long Island, N.Y., DeCicco said she wasn’t raised in a show business family, but said, “My parents would take me into the city to see Broadway shows. I thought, ‘Maybe I want to do this.’ ”
After studying theater in college, DeCicco gave professional acting a shot. Those early years were filled with long days of open casting calls, auditions and meetings with casting directors, as she tried to stand out among all the other aspiring talents.
“It felt exciting at the time,” DeCicco said. “I don’t really have the personality that when I have a setback, it discourages me. It makes me want to work harder.”
That hard work eventually led to a variety of roles in places such as Maine and Philadelphia. Then, she had the chance to audition for a spot in the national tour of “Wicked.”
“They handed me a huge stack of papers and said, ‘This is all the Glinda material.’ I put on my headphones and went to work learning it,” DeCicco said.
The next day, she got the part.
DeCicco’s upward career trajectory took her to Broadway. Recently, she performed in the musical “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” as Arachne, “sort of a fairy God-spider to Peter Parker.” The role required her to be suspended above the stage for her entire time onstage.
“I had never flown in a show before,” she said. “It was this crazy, weird, wonderful thing to go through.”
But after appearing in a number of big-budget musicals, DeCicco said she was eager for a change of pace, and wanted to tackle a more serious dramatic role. Enter Triad Stage and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” DeCicco said Maggie is exactly the type of role she was looking for.
“She’s a girl who, not unlike myself, wanted a specific life for herself,” she said. “Through the course of the show, you find out the secrets of their relationship and the past and how that affects what she wants.”
DeCicco said that although she’s familiar with the movie version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie and Paul Newman as Brick, she’s not leaning on that interpretation.
“What’s great is that all the information you need is on the page,” she said. “You don’t need to seek out answers anywhere else.”
