“Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1955 play, is headed for Broadway in a month or so.  But you can catch it right now much closer to home in a quietly powerful production at Theatre Harrisburg.

This work, about a family torn apart by jealousy, greed and an inability to face or tell the truth, is often played up to over-the-top Southern Gothic effect.  Director Thomas G. Hostetter has chosen a quieter vision, in which sheer histrionics take a back seat to the motivation of complex, memorable characters.

The down side is that there are moments when the energy lags.  But the audience is more than rewarded by the opportunity to savor the playwright’s profound, insightful and sometimes wickedly funny lines.

The play takes place during one long day on a Southern plantation as family and friends gather to celebrate the 65th birthday of the patriarch.

But there’s little to celebrate.  Big Daddy’s sons squabble over his love and inheritance, while the favored, Brick, is estranged from his wife, Maggie, his father and himself.

Delicately beautiful Brenda Eppley may not be the voluptuous spitfire one has come to expect of Maggie.  Her Southern accent wavers at times.  But she gets under your skin emotionally, where it counts.  Brick’s wife here may be catty and mercenary, but she’s in love with her husband and deeply wounded by his rejection.

That Brick is stuck in his own hell of isolation is heightened by Hostetter's physical isolation of him on stage.  But it is David Richwine's eloquent silences and gestures -- as he hops and falls around the stage on his crutch and cast -- that make the performance so strong.

Ed Costick may not be Big in the manner most men cast as Big Daddy are.  But his portrayal is on target, showing the many layers of a man driven by inarticulate love for his son, ambition, loathing for his wife, as well as fear of death.

It must be hard to play the somewhat silly, downtrodden matriarch of the family.   But Elizabeth Lavery brings humor and dignity, not just pathos, to Big Momma.

It’s always a pleasure to see David Fisher onstage, and he manages, even in the thanklessly small part of the unwanted son, Gooper, to make his presence felt.

Kelli Eberlein may be having the best time as Gooper’s pregnant, nasty wife.  If there were ever any doubt women compete over fertility, her Mae proves the point.

In the smaller roles, Dan Cohen is the Rev. Tooker and John Beck is Dr. Baugh.

Ben Chadwell, Alexa Knisely, Emily Levin and Daniel Rosenthal get to go wild on stage as Gooper and Mae’s bratty children.

The set, by Theatre Harrisburg’s production manager, Allen N. Marshall, is evocative of Southern architecture in an abstract way.  But the stand-alone columns speak volumes about family members who fail to communicate.