Word: gooper
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Although some of the problem stems from Williams's script, the minor characters in this production still do not receive adequate attention. Gooper, Brick's older brother and a successful Memphis lawyer, is played tepidly by John Rosetti. As Mae, Hughes exhibits enough shrewishness to make her dislikable, but not enough to make her detestable...
...Brick (Keir Dullea), who spurns her in bed and is drowning in alcohol out of fear that he may be a homosexual. Brick's father, Big Daddy (Fred Gwynne), is dying of cancer, and the childless Maggie is in a steely duel with Brick's brother Gooper (Charles Siebert) and his fecund wife Mae (Joan Pape) for the imminent in heritance of "28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile." What evolves is a series of confrontations that would reduce the forthcoming Foreman-Ali fight to a game of pattycake...
...Daddy's elder son, Gooper, is a greedy lawyer slavering to inherit the estate, and is married to Mae, a snotty and equally money-minded mother of an ever-expanding obnoxious brood of "no-neck monsters." The younger son, Brick, is an ex-athlete fallen into alcoholism, who refuses to become involved with anyone, including his wife Maggie. She is thus not only sexually frustrated and childless but, born into poverty, also fearful of losing the wealth into which she married. On the sidelines is the Reverend Tooker, a local clergyman adept at sniffing a fat bequest for a church...
...Daddy does come back; the thunderstorm has been curtailed; Gooper reinstates his witticism about Big Mama's double chin; and Brick ends the play, as he originally did, by being more ambiguous and less conclusive. The text can now, I think, in its fourth version be considered final. If there seems to be, generally, too much repetition of words and phrases, that's just the result of (my) personal taste...
...ever-pregnant Mae, Joan Pape has a more authentic accent than Maggie, but she is not nearly vicious and venomous enough. Charles Siebert's cigar-smoking Gooper is adequate. This couple is not up to the Madeleine Sherwood and Pat Hingle of 1955. Wyman Pendleton's Reverend Tooker is a deft sketch; and William Larsen has the unrewarding role of Doctor Baugh, who, like a messenger in Greek drama, is on hand merely as the bearer of bad tidings. The children and servants perform their bits admirably...