Scarlett Johansson in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; photo © 2012 Joan Marcus

To cast Scarlett Johansson as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is to risk turning the carefully balanced play into a mere star vehicle, and Rob Ashford’s production at the Richard Rodgers Theater walks right up to that line—right up until the moment at which Maggie (and Miss Johansson’s turbocharged take on the character) disappears from the stage for a good chunk of the play. And then the play becomes something else entirely, something like one of those clockwork models of the universe that so fascinated the philosophical cosmologists in the years before Galileo: wheels within wheels, everything turning in a kind of perfect balance. Of course, these are wheels of misery, despair, and dishonesty, and the play is a kind of perfect model of an imperfect world.

But what an awful bunch of people these Pollitts are. Brick, once a promising young athlete who later fell into a desultory career as a sports announcer, is mourning the loss of his boyhood friend Skipper, with whom he had a bond that exceeded the bounds of friendship but fell short—if only barely—of a fully consummated homosexual romance. He is estranged from his wife in part because of self-loathing over his own sexual ambiguity, a situation that Maggie compounded by initiating a sexual relationship with Skipper, the subsequent trauma of which was the proximate cause of his death. There is something