Coming On Strong as a Broadway ‘Cat’ : Kathleen Turner relishes the challenge and cachet of playing Tennessee Williams’ steamiest character

Decked out in a lace slip and little else, Kathleen Turner’s beckoning form looms over the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on West 49th Street, easily seducing passers-by from the two other marquees in view.

Without a glance at the title--”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” that drama club perennial--you might think Turner’s competition was “Lovers in Heat” at the World Porn Spectacular down the block, not Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle,” another Broadway revival playing under demure signage across the street.

Turner makes no apologies for stalking audiences with such impudence; this is her first sashay onto Broadway in more than a decade, and, with her role as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’ fervid melodrama, the actress shrugs, “I couldn’t imagine just creeping in unnoticed.”

She hasn’t.

Turner caused Boston Globe critic Kevin Kelly to loose an alliterative stream that would shame the most ardent publicist: she was “steamy, sultry, sexy, socko, sinuous, syncopated, scintillating,” his review stammered, before closing with a veiled hope: “serenade-able . . . “

Even the New York Times’ Frank Rich, said Turner was “mesmerizing to watch,” observing that “to see this actress put on her nylons, a ritual of exquisitely prolonged complexity, is a textbook lesson in what makes a star.”

Still, Turner hopes to show more than an ability to unroll her stockings. At age 35, she senses a crucial point in her career; seductress roles will grow scarcer as she ages, Turner notes, so the screen siren who made a name playing sexy, dangerous women wants to prove she can act as well.

The role of Maggie, which Turner calls “kind of a Hamlet for women,” met her objectives. She instigated the current production, which is directed by Howard Davies and features Charles Durning as Big Daddy, Polly Holliday as Big Mama and Daniel Hugh Kelly as their favorite son, Brick.

“I needed a good play, not just some vanity role that would get me on stage in the flesh, “ she said. Not that the flesh part bothered her: “When I get older,” she says, “there’ll be plenty of time to do Lady Macbeth and all that.”

Turner, of course, isn’t the only Hollywood figure who feels a need to prove something on a New York stage. This season, she joins actors ranging from Dustin Hoffman (“Merchant of Venice”) to Justine Bateman (“Crucible”), who have found Cliff Notes-certified classics the perfect vehicle for their talents.

“I don’t suppose there’s any film or TV actress who isn’t sometimes made to feel her medium is second-rate,” Turner said. “This play can only enhance my reputation. It’s got a cachet, it gives me what they call ‘legit’ acting credentials.”

The play, which Williams himself called “the American ‘Lear,’ ” depicts the dying hours of a Mississippi patriarch, Big Daddy Pollitt, and the duplicitous maneuverings of his eager heirs. Act I is essentially a monologue by the frustrated, clawing Maggie, who seeks to excite her taciturn husband, Brick. She yearns for a child to consummate her membership in the Pollitt clan, but the drunken Brick spurns her affection, unable to shake the memory of his friend Skipper, a suicide.

Audiences of the 1958 film version might have wondered why Brick, played by Paul Newman, scorned the ardors of Elizabeth Taylor’s Maggie. The present revival returns to Williams’ original text, which confronts the homosexual nature of Brick and Skipper’s friendship less obliquely.

More importantly for Turner’s purposes, it also shifts attention from Big Daddy to Maggie; unlike “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s” two other Broadway productions--the 1955 premiere and a 1974 revival--where Big Daddy thundered his way through the third and final act, the original text calls for that potentially distracting character to be out of Turner’s way by the end of Act II.

“I’ve never wanted to be a supporting actress,” she explains. “I’m damn good on stage and I want to show it.”

That doesn’t mean she’s unfazed by criticism, however. To Rich’s complaint that “she lacks the vulnerability of a woman ‘eaten up with longing’ for the man who shuns her bed,” Turner responds, “Vulnerable? I thought I was doing it. I mean, I get gulps from the audience.”

This vulnerability issue touches a nerve with Turner. “All my life I’ve been hearing that I’m not vulnerable enough. I don’t know what the hell they mean,” she said. “Does ‘vulnerable’ mean some essential inability to function? I guess, then, I’ve got a problem with it.”

Since her first screen role as “Body Heat’s” murderess 10 years ago, the Missouri-born Turner has artfully constructed her persona as a femme fatale. Roles in such movies as “Prizzi’s Honor,” “Crimes of Passion” and even as the voice of voluptuous Jessica in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” created the image; an off-screen acerbity and impatience with the celebrity press added to it. In interviews, she’s known to assume Spanish and British accents, drop into character unexpectedly, and dismiss the talents of the ‘40s icon she’s often compared to, Lauren Bacall.

“I’m an expert at presenting Kathleen Turner, capital K, capital T, whether it’s finding the right sentence to say, or the right way to say it. I have a kind of carriage that projects the beautiful, powerful presence of a woman,” she said. “That’s my job.”

Thus, Turner was quick to tell an interviewer that she had forgotten when the Academy Awards ceremony was scheduled this month. Not recognized for her role in “War of the Roses,” not asked to present an award to anyone else, the once-nominated Turner (for “Peggy Sue Got Married”) proclaimed: “Am I going to watch the Oscars? Hell no! They didn’t remember me, so I can’t be expected to remember them.”

When not engaged in the sultry affectations she sees as her job, however, Turner offered views on the state of theater, and the play she put together and previewed in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburg and Wilmington, Del., before opening on Broadway.

She admires Williams’ involved speeches, which “start off intensely naturalistic, but then switch to such tremendous poetry. It’s amazing how he does it,” she said.

Turner concedes, though, that the play’s topical themes haven’t held up as well as Williams’ poetry: Homosexuality, infidelity and cancer are no longer taboo subjects.

“There’s no shock value any more in having a woman come on stage and take off her dress,” Turner said. “But I think that change in attitude removes a distraction, it makes the play’s real content much stronger. The real issues are about honesty, not homosexuality.”

More recent works didn’t have the same appeal.

She admires David Mamet, but “would never in a million years do what Madonna did in ‘Speed the Plow.’ I didn’t like ‘Burn This.’ ‘The Heidi Chronicles?’ How could I do it? I’m not New York-bred, and I’m not Jewish.”

Nonetheless, Turner, who lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, real estate developer Jay Weiss and her 2-year-old daughter, Rachel Ann, aims to appear in at least one play and one film each year. In the fall, she plans to begin shooting a detective movie, “Hard Boiled.” After that--and after a hoped for second child--Turner said she’d like to perform in more vintage works, perhaps a Noel Coward play, or, coincidentally, to once again return a play made into an Elizabeth Taylor movie to the stage: Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”

“I was having this fight with (actor) Ron Silver, and I thought, ‘You know, we could really knock each other out on stage as Katherine and Petrucchio,” she said.

In addition to the credibility that major stage roles add to her movie career, Turner asserted an almost evangelical belief in theater’s value to society.

“I have this idea that outside church, theater is one of the few places you can be close to somebody and be part of a group experience at the same time. It’s amazing the trust that occurs, just from being so physically close to so many other people. It’s a way of lifting the isolation that people feel so much today.

That feeling of trust has its limits, though, even for a star as assured as Turner. Pointing to a box overhanging the Eugene O’Neill’s intimate stage, she recalled an audience member who seemed all too close.

“I’m on the bed kicking up my legs, putting on my stockings, and I look up, and the guy sitting in the box is staring at me through binoculars . Even for me, that’s a little too much.”