Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Content and Description

Garnering Williams a second Pulitzer Prize and a third Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at New York’s Morosco Theatre on March 24, 1955. In spite of bad press—several reviewers condemned the play’s sexually explicit content and coarse language—and Williams’s disappointment with Elia Kazan’s directorial vision and script revisions, the Broadway production ran for more than 600 performances. In 1958 the play was adapted for the screen under Richard Brooks’s direction and stared Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives in the lead roles.

With its crackling dialogue and piercing psychological insights, especially in Acts 1 and 2, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof presents Williams at the height of his powers. Although it captures life in a particular time and place, many of its themes are still relevant today: the complexity of sexuality, the consequences of living a double standard in a judgmental world, the tragic origins and outcomes of substance abuse, and finally, the universality of human dignity.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof examines the relationships forged by three generations of Pollitts, as they compete for ownership of the family estate. Set in a bedroom of Big Daddy Pollitt’s plantation home, the action takes place on a summer evening in the Mississippi Delta. When the curtain rises, the family (the patriarch, Big Daddy, his wife, Big Mama; their younger son, Brick, and his wife, Maggie; their older son, Gooper, and his pregnant wife, Mae; and their five children) has gathered for Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. As the story unfolds, we learn that Big Daddy has terminal cancer; that Maggie, Gooper, and Mae are angling for the family riches; and that Brick’s indifference, alcoholism, and refusal to share Maggie’s bed, much less conceive a child with her, threaten their chances of receiving an inheritance. After several onstage arguments, including one in which Maggie falsely claims to be pregnant, the play concludes as Brick agrees to “make the lie true.”

With just enough of a plot to propel the action forward, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is classic Williams: character driven, psychologically realistic, and rich in symbols. Having broken his ankle the night before, Brick is confined to the bedroom, hobbling back and forth in a ceaseless attempt to avoid interaction. A doubly wounded man, Brick needs a crutch to support his body and a bottle of whiskey to buoy his psyche. His greatest crutch, however, is his aloof personality. As his name and personality suggest, he erects psychological brick walls, emotionally blocking out his wife and family. Ironically, the action revolves around Brick in spite of his repeated attempts to remove himself from view. The only character who figures prominently in all three acts, Brick holds together the play’s structure in the same way the plantation holds together the Pollitt family.

In his Memoirs Williams claims that of all his major works, he liked Cat best. Adhering to Aristotle’s rule that “a tragedy must have unity of time and place and magnitude of theme,” Williams considered Cat “both a work of art and a work of craft” (168). Of his major plays Cat is the most tightly structured. Confined to a single, unchanged setting and proceeding seamlessly from beginning to end, the play diverges from the episodic structure Williams had used in his major pre-1955 scripts. His experimentation with classical rules for portraying time and space on the stage did not, however, prevent him from adding a few personal signatures.

Whereas classical drama is plot driven, Williams presents a character- propelled story. Also characteristic of Williams’s other plays—particularly The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—Cat follows Williams’s knack for creating stand-alone vignettes: Acts 1 and 2, for example, could work as miniplays staged on their own. Unlike in his earlier plays, however, Williams used real-time staging, limiting the passage of time to the action on the stage.

Of the four major prize-winning plays Williams composed, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the only one lacking a clear-cut hero. While several critics have argued that Blanche and Stanley in Streetcar and Shannon, Maxine, and Hannah in Night of the Iguana are the central characters, most find Blanche and Shannon to be their stories’ protagonists. With Cat, however, it is more difficult to isolate a protagonist. Both Maggie and Big Daddy spend too much time offstage to warrant serious consideration. Brick is physically present throughout, but he is often withdrawn from the conversation and from the audience’s view. Brick threads the play together by linking narratives and characters, but he often seems more a moving prop than a hero.

Although technically a protracted dialogue between Maggie and Brick, Act 1 often seems more Maggie’s monologue. The first third of the play is her show. The actress portraying her must summon all her talents in order to cycle through the kaleidoscopic array of emotions Maggie experiences in the first act. By turns vibrant, witty, spiteful, greedy, insightful, and caring, Maggie is both nauseating and charismatic. Though she sometimes appears to be interested only in the Pollitt family riches, she loves Brick intensely, even if she has expressed her desires in socially unacceptable ways. During the first act’s climactic exchange, when they finally divulge the cause of their caustic relationship, Maggie cries, “[Skipper and I] made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us! Yes, yes, yes! Truth, truth!” Incapable of recognizing Maggie’s sincerity, Brick sees only that she has broken an entrenched social covenant, not only by having an extramarital affair but also by sleeping with his best friend (perhaps even his true love). Maggie, on the brink of tears, professes genuine love for Brick, but, as with many of Williams’s characters, her departure from conventional sexual norms alienates her.

Act 1 introduces several important issues and themes that appear throughout the play. Brick and Maggie litter their conversation with sports metaphors, highlighting the competition upon which their marriage is based. Maggie, whose self-applied nickname, Maggie the Cat, sounds like a football mascot, copes with Brick’s despondency by pushing their disputes to the verge of conflict, hoping to draw Brick out and force him to make concessions. Brick’s refusal to respond to Maggie’s persistent adulation and cajolery makes her feel like a “cat on a hot tin roof.” This metaphor, as does everything else they discuss, means something different to each of them. For Maggie it signifies entrapment. No matter what she says or how she says it, Brick will never give her a second chance. For Brick, who considers Maggie’s self-pity banal and exaggerated, cats on hot tin roofs can always jump off or, in Maggie’s case, find sexual fulfillment elsewhere.

In Act 2, Maggie cedes the spotlight to Big Daddy, a man so domineering that his doctor is afraid to show him the lab results confirming terminal cancer. Act 2 also presents a second marriage, which, when compared to Maggie and Brick’s, broadens the play’s insight into southern patriarchal relations. We are given much less access to Big Mama and Big Daddy’s marriage, although we see enough to recognize its unbalanced and unhealthy structure. Big Daddy is verbally abusive and misogynistic. At one point he tells Brick that his clean bill of health makes him want to hire a prostitute, “strip her naked and smother her in minks and choke her with diamonds.”

Brick’s apathy and lack of sex drive are matched only by Big Daddy’s stridence and violent lust. Maggie and Big Mama are also polar opposites. Maggie is articulate and “well-bred,” whereas Big Mama is the opposite of the archetypal well-mannered southern gentlewoman. In spite of the different individual personalities involved, the two marriages are strikingly similar. Both men say they are disgusted with their wives’ “mendacious” habits. Brick “can’t stand” Maggie, and Big Daddy’s conversations with Big Mama are spiteful and cruel. Each marriage maintains a facade of functionality and happiness, yet devoid of tolerance and respect, neither allows intimacy and understanding.

Acts 1 and 2 bear nearly identical structures. Each portrays a conversation between Brick and another character, who dominates the conversation. Each ends with its own self-contained climax. In Act 2, Big Daddy does most of the talking. Although their discussion takes several seemingly aimless turns, Big Daddy returns to two subjects: Brick’s reasons for drinking and the overall difficulty of genuine communication. Finally, Brick justifies his drinking as a means of withdrawing from a world of “mendacity.” Big Daddy rebuffs Brick’s generalization as “ninety- proof bull,” suggesting that Brick is lying to himself. When Big Daddy spurns Brick’s explanation, he inadvertently identifies the self-loathing that defines Brick’s persona.

Brick hates the lying (“mendacious”) nature of human interaction, and yet he offers a vague generality about mendacity rather than admitting the truth about his drinking, a habit to which he turns in order to purge his guilt over Skipper’s death. After several subtle hints, Williams finally exposes the link between mendacity and self-loathing in the second act’s climactic sequence. Whether or not Brick is gay, a detail Williams leaves unresolved, it is clear Brick has been dishonest with both himself and others about his sexuality. Because he has internalized a southern moral code, Brick’s homophobia runs deep; he disowned his best friend because of it and now spends each day forcing his mind to “click” off, hoping to avoid any disturbing self-revelations.

The third act builds on the first two, confirming mendacity as the play’s thematic glue. As Big Daddy raves offstage about the liars who made him believe he was healthy, thereby symbolically taking his life, the rest of the family gathers to compete over the terms of his will. Suddenly, in a desperate attempt to secure the plantation for herself and Brick, Maggie announces the play’s most ostentatious lie: She is pregnant with Brick’s child. As the curtain closes with Brick reluctantly agreeing to help Maggie conceive, interpretive possibilities abound. Is lying necessary to maintain functional human relationships, as Maggie’s big lie seems to do for her marriage? Or, is it a fatal social disease, as Big Daddy claims?

Rather than answering these questions, Williams leaves it up to each audience member to pass judgment. As does the complex social world depicted on stage, in which each individual character reaches a different, if dissatisfying conclusion about lies and the liars who tell them, our own experiences with truth, half-truth, and untruth color the way we cope in a mendacious world.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Although Williams never approved of Kazan’s changes to Cat’s script for the Broadway production, Williams’s respect for Kazan’s vision led him to rewrite Act 3 for the stage. Since then, the play has always been published with two versions of the last act. After reading both versions, discuss their differences. Which version is more plausible? Which version is more consistent with the first two acts? Brick undergoes a more pronounced transformation in the Broadway version. How likely is he to change so much after one conversation with his father?

2. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features several recurring motifs, metaphors, and symbols—for example, cat/cattiness, sports/competition, and crutches. Choose one (not necessarily from this list), and discuss its meaning within the play’s context.

3. Mendacity is an important word in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What do you think Williams is trying to say about the role lying plays in our culture? Is lying sometimes necessary, or is it always wrong? Why?

4. Both Skipper and Allan Gray in A Streetcar Named Desire (especially in Scene 6) are absent gay men who wilted once subjected to homophobia. Now dead, each character haunts his respective story, playing a large role in key characters’ decisions, motivations, and emotional stability. Compare and contrast these men. Which is more rounded? What impact does each man have on the characters haunted by his memory?

5. Compare and contrast the set (what is actually on the stage) of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with that in A Streetcar Named Desire. Now compare the settings (the place the set is supposed to represent). Are there similarities between the Delta plantation bedroom and the two-room Elysian Fields apartment? How about between the mythical Belle Reve and the Pollitt home?