On March 24, 1955, a theatrical storm brewed on Broadway with the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Play. This landmark event not only marked a significant moment in American theatre history but also unleashed a powerful drama that continues to resonate today. Critic Brooks Atkinson, a prominent voice in theatre criticism, captured the play’s raw essence, proclaiming it “the quintessence of life.” The production became an instant sensation, catapulting Ben Gazzara to stardom and enjoying a remarkable run of nearly 700 performances.
Vintage Playbill cover for the original 1955 Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play”, highlighting the debut of Tennessee Williams’s iconic drama.
However, beneath the surface of its popular acclaim, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play is a work of intricate complexity, posing considerable challenges for both performers and directors. Its delicate balance of themes and nuanced character portrayals requires a precise understanding, where even slight misinterpretations can derail the entire production. As a testament to its enduring power, numerous interpretations have emerged over the years, each grappling with the play’s profound depths. One notable production, witnessed at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 2016, offered a compelling interpretation, prompting insightful script and character analysis, highlighting the ongoing fascination and interpretive possibilities within Williams’s text.
The Tortured Path to Perfection: Williams’s Creative Struggle
The creation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play was far from smooth. Tennessee Williams himself described the writing process as tormenting, grappling with the play’s “messy” nature. He confided in his journal, expressing concern that “the intrusion of the homosexual theme may be fucking it up again,” revealing his anxieties about incorporating such sensitive themes into his work during a less accepting era. Despite these internal conflicts, Williams persevered, driven by a commitment to the play’s “terrible sort of truthfulness.”
Marilyn Monroe, a prominent figure in Hollywood, attending the Broadway premiere of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, showcasing the play’s broad appeal.
Letters exchanged between Williams and his agent, Audrey Wood, and director Cheryl Crawford, offer a glimpse into the play’s evolution. In April 1954, Williams sent Wood a draft, acknowledging its rough state and feeling of being “wordy” and “too short.” Yet, he recognized its structural tightness and potent final curtain. By June, Crawford expressed enthusiasm, even comparing its material to “Streetcar Named Desire,” but suggested adding another act. This sparked a debate about the play’s length and completeness, a disagreement that would foreshadow the more significant creative clashes to come with director Elia Kazan.
Kazan’s Influence and the Battle for the Third Act
Elia Kazan was Williams’s unwavering choice for director, their close professional and personal relationship marked by candid, sometimes forceful, exchanges. Their collaboration on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play became a site of intense creative negotiation, particularly concerning the play’s structure and the role of Big Daddy in the final act.
Williams, in a letter to Kazan, passionately defended his vision, emphasizing the play’s inherent “rage” as a positive, dynamic force. He articulated his understanding of Brick’s character, a man seemingly blessed with admiration and love, yet internally fractured by conflicting desires and the tragic loss of Skipper. Williams saw Maggie as the catalyst for Brick’s potential survival, teaching him to navigate the “hot tin roof” of human existence. He declared “Vitality is the hero of the play!” highlighting the resilience needed to endure life’s harsh realities.
However, Kazan and Wood believed the dramatic climax should reside in the third act, not the second as Williams had structured it. This fundamental disagreement led to the unprecedented publication of two distinct versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play: Williams’s original preferred version and Kazan’s staged adaptation. Kazan argued for Big Daddy’s crucial presence in the third act to provide a sense of resolution and convey his ultimate fate. While Williams initially resisted, he eventually conceded to adding a scene with Big Daddy, though he reportedly felt it was not his strongest writing.
Despite these artistic differences, Kazan’s commitment to directing remained steadfast. Williams, in a November 1954 letter, expressed his desire to maintain the play’s “hard core,” resisting any temptation towards sentimentality. He saw the play as an exploration of “good bastards and good bitches,” exposing the “shocking duality of the single heart.” He appreciated Kazan’s efforts to highlight the positive aspects of Maggie and Big Daddy, aiming for a final effect that was not purely negative, but rather a step towards a “larger truth.”
Decoding Brick: Tommy Lee Jones’s Nietzschean Insight
The character of Brick Pollitt stands as a central enigma in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play. His motivations, his paralysis, and his complex relationship with Skipper have puzzled audiences and actors alike. Even Tommy Lee Jones, who famously portrayed Brick, acknowledged the character’s inherent challenge.
During a talk at an acting school, Jones responded to a student’s question about “what’s up with Brick?” with an insightful perspective. He revealed his approach to the role was rooted in Nietzschean philosophy, reflecting Williams’s own fascination with the philosopher. Jones viewed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play as Williams’s most well-constructed work and possibly his “only truly great play,” highlighting the play’s enduring dramatic power.
Williams himself resisted simplifying Brick, writing in his journal about Kazan’s desire for character “progress”: “Things are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don’t always ‘progress’.” He saw Brick’s “poetic mystery” as essential, emphasizing that he didn’t fully understand Brick, just as we rarely fully understand those closest to us. Brick is not a problem to be solved, but a complex human being to be explored.
Ben Gazzara, the original Broadway actor who portrayed Brick Pollitt in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play”, delivering a nuanced performance of the conflicted character.
In a letter to Kazan, Williams delved deeper into Brick’s motivations, connecting his drinking to fear and an inability to confront truth. He posited that Brick’s love for Skipper was the “one great good thing in his life,” an idealized romantic attachment to adolescence and sports. Intriguingly, Williams suggested Brick was “homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment,” a concept he observed in others, including Marlon Brando. He described such individuals as potentially “undersexed,” sublimating their deep, romantic loves into other areas. The “ripping off of the mask” – the confrontation with the truth about Skipper – becomes the catalyst for Brick’s retreat into alcoholism.
Williams argued that Brick does change, albeit internally. He is “faced the truth” under Big Daddy’s pressure, but whether this breaks his paralysis remains ambiguous. Williams saw Brick as a “living sacrifice,” a victim of the “falsities and cruel prejudices” of his world. He defended the dramatic power of paralysis, drawing a parallel to Chekhovian characters, where inaction can be as significant as progress.
Casting Maggie and Brick: Kazan’s Intuition and Gazzara’s Breakthrough
Kazan’s casting choices for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play were crucial to its success. He selected Barbara Bel Geddes for Maggie, an actress he felt embodied the character’s complex sexuality stemming from personal experiences with body image and self-perception. Kazan believed Bel Geddes’s “uncertainty about her appeal” paradoxically fueled a “strong sexual appetite,” mirroring Maggie’s desperate fight for Brick’s attention and affection.
Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie “the Cat” and Ben Gazzara as Brick in the original Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, showcasing the central dynamic of the play.
Ben Gazzara, cast as Brick, was a rising star from the Actors Studio. The role was a “dream come true” for Gazzara, eager to work with both Williams and Kazan. He recognized the depth Williams provided actors, citing Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire as examples. Gazzara aimed to portray Brick’s rejection of Maggie not as disgust, but as a consequence of the devastating loss of Skipper, “the friend he’d loved with a love he never admitted, even to himself.” He focused on finding the “broken part of Brick” within himself.
A young Ben Gazzara, who achieved stardom with his portrayal of Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play”, capturing the character’s brooding intensity.
Gazzara recounted the tense atmosphere of the first rehearsal, with a silent and scrutinizing cast and creative team. However, once the reading began, he was captivated by the power of Williams’s dialogue brought to life by the actors. He also described moments of friction, particularly Williams’s dissatisfaction with Bel Geddes’s portrayal of Maggie, finding her “too wholesome.” Kazan, however, strategically cast Bel Geddes for her audience appeal, believing she could make the complex character more relatable.
Mielziner’s Set and the Essence of Theatricality
Jo Mielziner, a frequent collaborator with Kazan, designed the minimalist and impactful set for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play. Kazan emphasized that both he and Mielziner understood the play’s strength lay in its “brilliant rhetoric and its theatricality,” rather than strict realism. He felt a realistic set would detract from the power of Williams’s language, forcing artificial stage business to justify Big Daddy’s extended speeches.
Mielziner’s design featured a large, triangular platform tilted towards the audience, dominated by an ornate bed. This stark simplicity stripped away extraneous details, focusing attention on the characters and their intense interactions. The set design itself became a statement, rejecting realism in favor of highlighting the play’s inherent theatricality and the power of Williams’s words.
Williams’s Notes and the Pursuit of “Truth”
Even after rehearsals were underway, Tennessee Williams remained deeply involved, providing Kazan with detailed notes. He emphasized the “poetry of the macabre” he aimed to create in the seemingly trivial opening scenes of Act Three, highlighting the “false, heartless, grotesquely undignified way” society treats serious matters by focusing on trivialities. He lamented that this nuance was lost in a “distractingly formalistic treatment.”
Williams also critiqued the portrayal of Doc Baugh, envisioning him as an “ironically detached” observer of life and death, not as an over-involved “member of the family.” He appreciated the non-realistic staging of the storm fading into a Negro lullaby, praising its beauty and lack of exaggeration.
Despite his detailed critiques, Williams concluded his notes with high praise for Kazan’s direction, calling it “one of your greatest jobs.” He reiterated his central aim: to convey the play’s profound “truth,” even if it wasn’t conventionally “great” or “good.” Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play, for Williams, was fundamentally about “human truth.”
Pulitzer Prize and Enduring Legacy
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play garnered significant critical acclaim, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics’ Award in 1955. Williams, upon hearing of these accolades, sent a telegram to the cast, acknowledging their essential contribution: “DEAR PLAYERS: I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT YOU ALL GAVE ME THE PRIZES. ALL MY LOVE= TENNESSEE.”
Publicity image for the original Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play”, celebrating its critical and popular success.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof play endures as a testament to Tennessee Williams’s dramatic genius and his unflinching exploration of complex human emotions and societal hypocrisies. Its journey from a “messy” draft to a Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a compelling narrative of creative struggle, collaboration, and the unwavering pursuit of theatrical truth. The play’s continued relevance lies in its unflinching portrayal of family dynamics, suppressed desires, and the universal search for authenticity in a world often built on mendacity.
