Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1151by a shelter of black umbrellas. This dark image and
the approaching darkness of nightfall symbolizes
death, the final stage of life.
John A. Price
wiLLiamS, TENNESSEE Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof earned Tennessee Williams
(1911–83) his second Pulitzer Prize in 1955. The
story centers on Big Daddy’s and Maggie’s attempts
to bring Brick out of a drunken malaise brought on
by the death of his friend Skipper, a relationship
many suspect was sexual, which Brick vehemently
denies. Skipper’s death also resulted in the end of
Brick’s career in professional football as a player and
announcer. Both his wife, Maggie, and his father,
Big Daddy, use their personal strengths to try and
motivate Brick. The former uses her sensuality,
while the latter uses the sheer force of his will to
shame his son into reclaiming his former vitality
and assuming authority over the massive empire he
wishes to leave Brick.
The play’s second act stands among Williams’s
best writing, as Big Daddy rants and raves about
overcoming life’s disappointments as fireworks from
his birthday party and thunder and lightning explode
in the background. Brick, however, is able to subdue
his father by revealing that the family has lied to the
patriarch about the cancer that will soon end his
life. The ending is complicated, as the playwright
offered two versions. In the first, performed in the
initial Broadway production, Brick accepts Maggie’s
plan to conceive a child, which will cement her and
Brick’s status as heirs to Big Daddy’s fortune. In the
second, the one preferred by the playwright, Mag-
gie virtually entraps Brick, playing on his weakness
for alcohol, and the child promised by their sexual
reunion at the end of the play is conceived amid
more of the mendacity Brick seeks to escape from,
leaving the family in a vicious cycle of lies and greed
that threatens to destroy it.
Chris Bell
FutILIty in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The characters in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof battle with either succumbing to or
continuing to fight the futility that pervades the
atmosphere of this play, set in the bedroom that
Brick and Maggie use when staying with Brick’s
father, the bombastic Big Daddy. The set provides
the background for the theme of futility. Williams
describes the room’s opulence, with its vivid colors
and expensive accoutrements. Yet this sensual envi-
ronment belies the reality of its occupants’ lives, as
Brick refuses to sleep with his wife, punishment
for her affair with his best friend Skipper, which
Maggie insists was a foiled attempt to somehow
reach her increasingly alcohol-dependent husband.
An important complement to this situation is Wil-
liams’s description of a “huge console combination of
radio-phonograph (hi-fi with three speakers) TV set
and liquor cabinet, . . . a very complete and compact
little shrine to virtually all the comforts and illusions
behind which we hide from such things as the char-
acters in the play are faced with.”
The characters must decide when to reveal the
reality of Big Daddy’s cancer, which the man him-
self and his wife are told is nothing more than a
“spastic colon.” For Maggie, who knows the truth,
Big Daddy’s impending death leaves her little
time to get Brick off the bottle and back in his
father’s good graces, so he can assume authority of
Big Daddy’s plantation, effectively ensuring finan-
cial security for her and her progeny. Yet Maggie’s
trouble does not end with Brick. Gooper, Brick’s
older brother, a successful litigator, stands ready to
use legal avenues to ensure Big Daddy’s legacy will
not be drowned in Brick’s dependence on Echo
Springs liquor.
Of course, none of this is apparent to Big Daddy,
whom Williams leaves offstage in the first act, but
whose appearance in act 2 is like a hurricane that
does not let up until his fiery exit at the end, after
Brick reveals to him that he does in fact have can-
cer. Much of Big Daddy’s ranting, while fantastic
theater, is futile, as the audience understands that
this man’s plan to embrace his new lease on life will
not occur. Shortly after Big Daddy learns the truth,
Big Mama learns the truth as well, and although
she initially claims she will not give her husband
the morphine that will take away his pain but also
render him catatonic, she realizes the futility of this
when Big Daddy howls in pain offstage.