TV REVIEW : A Homemaker’s World Collapses in ‘Mrs. Cage’

With all the focus in recent years on independent, liberated women, the dilemma of the traditional wife and homemaker has received scant attention from dramatists.

That inattention comes to a shattering halt in playwright Nancy Barr’s mesmerizing drama of a docile, middle-aged housewife who commits a bizarre crime of passion in “Mrs. Cage” (on “American Playhouse” tonight at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15), featuring a remarkable portrayal by Anne Bancroft.

Originally staged in a small Santa Monica theater two years ago as a two-character duologue between a murderess and a detective, the play has been artfully opened up with flashbacks and images that explain the housewife’s state of mind--most notably her dutiful ironing of her husband’s dress shirts, which are neatly arrayed by the dozens in his pristine closet in a scene that seems straight out of “The Great Gatsby.” (In the stage play, this irony was conveyed as an expressionistic device, with the stage’s entire back wall adorned with glistening, starched shirts.)

Barr, who adapted her own play, and director Robert Allan Ackerman, a veteran stage director making his first film, create a translucent, 70-minute television drama that makes a haunting statement about society’s lost and ridiculed women--the forgotten ones who stay at home. The titled Mrs. Cage (her symbolic name is no accident) has been sublimely content not to work but rather to serve her lawyer husband and careerist daughter as a homemaker whose secure world and whole sense of identity subtly and horribly collapses.

She’s 53 and ignored by her own family. From this perspective, “Mrs. Cage” ranks among the most refreshing and telling works on women’s issues. The wife’s crime (both visualized and later narrated by the wife during her interrogation by a low-key detective sensitively played by Hector Elizondo) is on the surface a crazy little urban murder that we read about almost daily and dismiss.

It’s that questioning that turns this drama into a riveting dissection of the psychological and emotional turmoil that inextricably led to the shooting.

Pointedly, the wife wants no lawyer and insists that she was quite sane when she pulled the trigger. (The recent CBS-TV movie “In the Name of My Daughter” posed a quite similar situation with the Donna Mills heroine.) In fact, Mrs. Cage, in a line heard early in the movie, says she is wide awake for the first time in her whole life.

Bancroft (seen recently as another tradition-bound housewife trying to deal with tumultuous change in the TV adaptation of Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound”) catches the strength and candor of her character in a performance that shakes you to your shoes. And Elizondo perfectly mirrors the delicate tactics of the diligent and, here, understanding, unbullying detective.