Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Like Dial M for Murder, this play has not aged well. Tennessee Williams’ southern gothic drama demonstrates the generally corrosive effect of the Freudian world-view, at least as vulgarized on Broadway, on American drama – the play’s fundamental assumption is that sexual repression is the root of all evil and that once this repression is lifted all will be well. Hence, the play’s structure turns on a devising a complex system of lies and secrets, the edifice that the super-ego has erected over the teeming lecherous disorder of the subconscious, and, then, exposing that edifice as built on destructive deceit. In a play like this, the structure of lies and self-deception reared by civilization, here defined as the society governed by cotton plantation barons in the Mississippi Delta, becomes increasingly tenuous until it is uprooted entirely by a lacerating “reveal” occupying most of the last act of the drama. The play turns on the questionable fiction that alcoholics drink to forget past miseries – in fact, alcoholics drink to drink and most past miseries that they might wish to obliterate with booze are the results of that self-same drinking. In Williams’ play, mendacity rules: homosexual desire is suppressed and the patriarch’s cancer is unmentionable – at least until the last act. Williams, in some notes on the play, says that he never made up his mind as to whether the play’s hero, Brick, is homosexual and this confusion persists, and attenuates, the drama’s denoument. The problem is that the confusion in the play is not legitimate ambiguity and ambivalence – a perfectly acceptable state of affairs so long as reasonably intended by the playwright. Rather, it seems that Williams is being deliberately coy – he wants the homosexual cognoscenti in his audience to decipher Brick’s dilemma as that of a self-repressed closeted homosexual while, at the same time, signaling to the hoi-polloi that Brick is completely straight and that the ministrations of Maggie the Cat will restore him to vigorous, and procreatively, efficient, manhood. There is something of the stench of pandering about this play. Furthermore, Williams’ withdraws from the implications of his own material. Early in the play, he has planted the seed that Big Daddy is sexually interested in Brick’s frustrated Maggie. A much stronger, and more interesting play, would define Brick as clearly homosexual, albeit closeted, and have a scion to the plantation engendered by Big Daddy himself on the compliant body of the Cat. But, I suppose, this would have been too much for the dark, booze-drenched early fifties. The Guthrie’s production is wonderfully polished and beautifully lit and the players, of course, magnificent – if a little bit “campy” and “over the top.” The slatternly Maggie prances around in lingerie, Brick drinks at least four bottles of ersatz Jack Daniels as we watch – the actor must spend every second of his off-stage time in the toilet – and Big Daddy is memorably vicious and tragic. But the play goes on and on and the big secrets brought to light in the last scene have been bruited about so intensely during the first two hours or so that there’s no surprise of any sort – the only shock is that Brick after consuming gallons of booze seems ready and willing at last to have sex with his beautiful wife, implicitly a commentary on the extent of homosexual disdain for women that is too depressing to contemplate.