The Pickup's Culture coverage is brought to you by Tulsa Artists' Coalition Gallery, 40 Years of Empowering Tulsa Artists. Visit TAC Gallery to see American Highway Revisited by VC Torneden and Melinda Harvey Green, June 5 – 27, 2026.
American Theatre Company and B&Z Productions: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Norman Theatre
June 13, 2026
American Theatre Company has had a busy and unique season. After staging an original works competition and its 49th rendition of the holiday classic A Christmas Carol, the community theatre organization mounted a couple one-night-only productions out of its new home at WOMPA: Dear Jack, Dear Louise in the black box and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the mixed-used outdoor space. For their season finale, ATC teamed up with B&Z Productions to bring the 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.
Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama takes place during a single evening in Mississippi, where the Pollitt family gathers to celebrate patriarch Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. In attendance are his wife Big Mama, their sons Brick and Gooper with their wives Maggie “the Cat” and Mae, and Mae and Gooper's five kids. Add in a roaming reverend, the family doctor harboring horrible news, a maid, and a butler, and the Pollitts’ vast 28,000 acre plantation feels claustrophobic, the perfect pressure cooker to crack the family mendacity (a word I learned in this very production!)
In her directorial debut, Ya Mi Vang staged the play in the new-to-me Norman Theatre. Even though this is one of the Tulsa Performing Arts Center’s two black box spaces, it felt like I was seeing a production in a “found space.” Chairs formed three rows on the floor and the ceiling was stripped of the usual stage lights. Vang found ways to make both the room and the story feel enveloping with two light stands at the front corners of the stage, a classic living room set with high walls, and some banging costumes (*cough cough* Maggie’s dress). Even with a few modern furnishings mixed with the antiques on the set, I found myself sucked into the Pollitt family drama.
Williams does not make the actors’ jobs easy, giving them pages-long monologues laced with subtext. For example, the first act is essentially a 50-minute monologue from Maggie, who talks to, at, and about her husband, Brick. Brick spends the scene disengaged, cradling a glass of whiskey as he props up his broken leg on a coffee table. He injects a comment on occasion, as do nosy Mae and Big Mama when they pop in and out of their bedroom, but the scene is essentially Maggie talking. For the audience and the actor alike, a scene like this can be an exciting challenge or a daunting task.