Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Play)

"What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?--I wish I knew. Just staying on, I guess, as long as she can," says Maggie "the Cat" Pollitt in Tennessee Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As I continue my year-long look at Williams' work, I read this play for the first time last night. I have seen the film version, which Williams hated, but due to the restricted time period, played down the homosexual aspects.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a simmering cauldron of sex, lies, and recriminations. It takes place on one night in the bedroom/sitting room of Brick and Maggie. He is a washed up football player, and most recently a sports announcer. The early morning of the play he was out, drunk, on the high school athletic field, and broke his ankle trying to run the hurdles. Now he hobbles around on a crutch, continually drinking.

The occasion is the birthday party for Brick's father, Big Daddy, the biggest cotton grower on the Mississippi delta. Big Daddy is larger-than-life force. He has been to the doctor, who has given him a clean bill of health, but the truth, known to Brick, Maggie, and Brick's brother Gooper and sister-in-law, Mae, is that Big Daddy has inoperable cancer.

Over the course of the play we will learn that Brick will not sleep with Maggie, despite her enticements. Gooper, who has five children with shrill Mae, is the elder son, but is unliked by Big Daddy, who would like to leave his estate to Brick. The mother, Big Mama, has been emotionally abused for forty years by Big Daddy, but she chooses to overlook it.

The lurking secret of the play is that Brick is drinking heavily since the suicide of his football buddy, Skipper. Maggie suspected a relationship that was closer than friendship--she voiced this to Skipper, who slept with her to prove his heterosexuality. The suspicion is that Brick spurned Skipper, which caused his suicide. The film doesn't contain any mention of this at all, but it's spelled out in the play, in a confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy that is built around the word "mendacity." "You think so, too? You think so, too! You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!--sodomy!--together?...You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'--me, is that what you think of Skipper?"

To further amplify this, it is discussed that the two previous owners were long-time bachelors who shared a bed. Clearly, this could not be mentioned in a film from 1958.

The film, on the page, seems a cacophony, as often there are many characters on stage at the same time, buzzing around, including Gooper and Mae's obnoxious children. Sex is ever present--Maggie says, "You know, if I thought you would never, never, never make love to me again--I would go downstairs to the kitchen and pick out the longest and sharpest knife I could find and stick it straight into my heart." Big Daddy, in his conversation with Brick, mentions that until recently he had still slept with his wife, despite his general contempt for her. But breeding, as seen with Gooper and Mae, is portrayed in a negative light--there is not sentimental view of family going on here.

Death is also an ever-present theme. In addition to Skipper's suicide, there is Big Daddy's mortality, which he is clearly not ready for: "Ignorance--of mortality--is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, but a man sometimes, he can keep a tight mouth about it."

The three main characters of Brick, Big Daddy, and Maggie are sharply drawn. Brick, of course, literally has a crutch--he is often separated from it and has to beg for it. At the end of the play, Maggie, in an attempt to get him to impregnate her, throws it out the window. As the title character, Maggie is the most sympathetic character. Williams, who writes voluminous stage directions, indicates that she is "the only one there who is conscious of and amused by the grotesque."

Williams rewrote the play a few times. The American Library edition of Williams' plays contain both third acts--the original does not have Big Daddy return to the stage in that act, but director Elia Kazan thought it best. The original production starred the recently departed Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and Burl Ives as Big Daddy, who would reprise the role in the film.

Williams, in another long stage direction, writes, "The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy flickering, evanescent--fiercely charged!--interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in ones own character to himself."

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was Williams' personal favorite of his plays. I don't find it as moving as The Glass Menagerie or as powerful as A Streetcar Named Desire, but it certainly packs a wallop. I'd like to see it on the stage to fully absorb it's effects.