Review/Theater; Turner and Durning in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'

It takes nothing away from Kathleen Turner's radiant Maggie in ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' to say that Broadway's gripping new production of Tennessee Williams's 1955 play will be most remembered for Charles Durning's Big Daddy. The actor's portrayal of a 65-year-old Mississippi plantation owner in festering extremis is an indelible hybrid of red-neck cutup and aristocratic tragedian, of grasping capitalist and loving patriarch.

Just try to get the image of Mr. Durning - a dying volcano in final, sputtering eruption under a Delta moon - out of your mind. I can't. ''Cat'' is a curiously constructed work in which the central but sullen character of Brick, the all-American jock turned booze hound, clings to the action's periphery while Act I belongs to his wife, Maggie, Act II to his Big Daddy and the anti-climactic Act III (of which the author left several variants) to no one. Such is Mr. Durning's force in the second act at the O'Neill that he obliterates all that comes after, despite the emergence of Polly Holliday's poignant Big Mama in the final stretch.

Mr. Durning's Act II tour de force begins with low comedy: the portly, silver-haired actor, dressed in a sagging white suit and wielding a vaudeville comedian's stogie, angrily dismisses his despised, nattering wife and his bratty grandchildren, those cap-gun-toting ''no-neck monsters'' who would attempt to lure him into a saccharine birthday party. From that hilarious display of W. C. Fields dyspepsia, it is quite a leap to the act's conclusion. By then, Mr. Durning is white with fear, clutching the back of a chair for support, for he has just learned what the audience has long known: Big Daddy is being eaten away by cancer that ''has gone past the knife.''

In between comes a father-son confrontation that is not only the crux of Mr. Durning's performance but also the troubling heart of a play that is essential, if not first-rank, Williams. Big Daddy loves Brick (Daniel Hugh Kelly) and would like to favor him when dividing his estate of $10 million and ''28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.'' But there are mysteries to be solved before the writing of the will. Why are Brick and Maggie childless? Why is Brick, once a football hero and later a television sports announcer, now, at 27, intent on throwing away his life as if it were ''something disgusting you picked up on the street''? How did Brick break his ankle in the wee hours of the night before?

Mr. Durning will have his answers, even if he has to knock Brick off his crutch to get them. But his Big Daddy, while tough as a billy goat, is not a cartoon tyrant. He wants to talk to his son, not to badger him. He offers Brick understanding and tolerance in exchange for the truth, even if that truth might be Brick's closeted homosexual passion for his best friend and football buddy, Skipper, now dead of drink. All Big Daddy wants is freedom from the lies and hypocrisy of life that have so long disgusted him. Yet Brick, while sharing that disgust, won't surrender his illusions without a fight.

''Mendacity is the system we live in,'' the son announces. ''Liquor is one way out and death's the other.'' When the truth finally does emerge - and for both men it is more devastating than any sexual revelation - liquor and death do remain the only exits. Life without the crutch of pipe dreams or anesthesia is too much to take. As the lights dim on Act II, Mr. Kelly is isolated in a stupor and Mr. Durning, his jaw distorted by revulsion and rage, is howling like Lear on the heath. Advancing relentlessly into the bowels of his mansion, the old man bellows an epic incantation of ''Lying! Dying! Liars!'' into the tall shadows of the Southern Gothic night.

Along with the high drama and fine acting - Mr. Kelly's pickled Adonis included - what makes the scene so moving is Williams's raw sensitivity to what he called (in his next play, ''Orpheus Descending'') man's eternal sentence to solitary confinement. In ''Cat,'' Maggie probably does love Brick, Big Mama probably does love Big Daddy, and Brick loves Skipper and Big Daddy as surely as they have loved him. Yet the lies separating those who would love are not easily vanquished. In this web of familial, fraternal and marital relationships, Williams finds only psychic ruin, as terminal as Big Daddy's cancer and as inexorable as the greed that is devouring the romantic Old South.

In his revival, Howard Davies, the English director last represented in New York by ''Les Liaisons Dangereuses,'' keeps his eye on that bigger picture: Williams's compassion for all his trapped characters and his desire to make his play ''not the solution of one man's psychological problem'' but a ''snare for the truth of human experience.'' With the exception of Mae (Debra Jo Rupp), Brick's conniving sister-in-law, everyone on stage is human. The playwright doesn't blame people for what existence does to them. He has empathy for the defeated and admiration for those like Maggie who continue the fight for life and cling to the hot tin roof ''even after the dream of life is all over.''

From her salt-cured accent to her unabashed (and entirely warranted) delight in her own body heat, Miss Turner is an accomplished Maggie, mesmerizing to watch, comfortable on stage and robustly good-humored. Merely to see this actress put on her nylons, a ritual of exquisitely prolonged complexity, is a textbook lesson in what makes a star. Miss Turner is so good as far as she goes that one wishes she'd expose her emotions a shade more - without compromising her admirable avoidance of a campy star turn. Her Maggie is almost too stubbornly a survivor of marital wars; she lacks the vulnerability of a woman ''eaten up with longing'' for the man who shuns her bed.

Though somewhat more can be made of Brick - and was by Ian Charleson, in Mr. Davies's previous staging of ''Cat'' in London - Mr. Kelly captures the detachment of defeat, and later the rage, of a man who buried hope in his best friend's grave. When Brick is finally provoked to stand up for the ''one great good true thing'' in his life, the actor gives an impassioned hint of the noble figure who inspired worship from all who knew him. But it's a major flaw of ''Cat'' that this character is underwritten. Williams defines the physique of his golden boy - and Mr. Kelly fleshes that out, too - but leaves the soul opaque.

Since Brick doesn't pull his weight in any of the playwright's third acts for ''Cat,'' it hardly matters which one is used. Mr. Davies reverts to the unsentimental original draft, which never made it to the stage in Elia Kazan's initial Broadway production. Miss Holliday's Big Mama, an unstrung Amanda Wingfield brought to her own grief by others' mendacity, is a rending figure within the thunderstorm of the denouement. Along with the supporting cast, the designers' vision of a decaying South - from the fading veranda to the intrusion of the latest American innoculation against intimacy, a 1950's console television - thickens the rancid mood of a household where, in Big Mama's words, ''such a black thing has come . . . without invitation.''

But even in Act III, even offstage, Mr. Durning continues to dominate, and, in a way, he gets the big scene with the star that the script denies him. As Maggie tenaciously clings to her tin roof, Big Daddy can be heard from somewhere deep within, his terrifying screams of pain rattling that roof, threatening even at death's doorstep to blow the lid off life's cruel, incarcerating house of lies.

FIGHTING THE LIES

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, by Tennessee Williams; directed by Howard Davies; scenery, William Dudley; costumes, Patricia Zipprodt; lighting, Mark Henderson; sound, T. Richard Fitzgerald; hair design, Robert DiNiro; music composed by Ilona Sekacz; technical supervisor, Arthur Siccardi; associate lighting designer, Beverly Emmons; production manager, Patrick Horrigan. Presented by Barry and Fran Weissler. At the Eugene O'Neill Theater, 230 West 49th Street.

Maggie . . . Kathleen Turner

Brick . . . Daniel Hugh Kelly

Mae . . . Debra Jo Rupp

Big Mama . . . Polly Holliday

Sookey . . . Edwina Lewis

Dixie . . . Amy Gross

Big Daddy . . . Charles Durning

Gooper . . . Kevin O'Rourke

Rev. Tooker . . . Nesbitt Blaisdell

Dr. Baugh . . . Jerome Dempseyy

Trixie . . . Erin Torpey

Polly . . . Suzy Bouffard

Buster . . . Seth Jerome Walker

Sonny . . . Billy L. Sullivan

Brightie . . . Ron Brice

Lacey . . . Marcial Howard