Tennessee Williams. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: New American Library, 1955. Print.

I teach Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and I am somewhat familiar with a lot of what Williams wrote, so it was time for me to read (or perhaps re-read after many years) his classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Maggie is the cat. Is her football-hero now alcoholic husband Brick a homosexual? Or is that mere innuendo made up by Brick’s brother Gooper who wants to inherit the family cotton plantation? After all, Brick and Maggie have no children and Gooper has five with another on the way. And their father Big Daddy owns 28,000 acres, the largest landholding in the Delta.

That is one of the basic conflicts. But Williams tells a good story. His dialogue is direct and at the same time borders on the poetic. The conflict comes alive. And perhaps unlike some of his other plays, there is tenderness in the telling. The ending is most moving. It reminded me of the ending of O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, another great drama featuring a tragic alcoholic and a female lead reminiscing on what was and dreaming of what might have been.

The Signet Edition here has two versions of Act III. Elia Kazan, with Williams’ blessing, rewrote some of the dialogue for the stage production which Kazan directed. This is presented as an appendix. Both versions are effective and outcome is the same. It is not like the two different endings to Dickens’ Great Expectations. However, Kazan’s “Broadway Version,” as the book names it, shows Maggie a little more nobly. Kazan wanted us to care about her, and we do.

There is more of the Southern grotesque in this play. Gooper’s “no-neck” children and snooty wife would be at home in a story by Flannery O’Connor. Although the basic plot concerns the serious question of who will get the inheritance, the family is also trying to keep Big Daddy from knowing the truth about his own medical condition. They are telling him he has a spastic colon when he is really dying from cancer. Big Daddy does figure it out: Doctors do not treat spastic colons with morphine.

Williams reveals things about himself in his introduction and stage directions. He describes a group of little girls playing dress up, and one of them begins to shout, “Look at me, look at me, look at me!” (vii) Williams confesses that he and likely many other writers are in effect saying the same thing, and if they write well “not only attract observers but participants.” (viii)

One of the stage directions in Act II also tells us something about what the writer is trying to do—and if the audience or reader recognizes this, it makes for great art:

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 a character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

I have only read this play, never seen it. But it is easy to imagine this being played out effectively, honestly, and, yes, tenderly. Perhaps, too, revealing something of ourselves to ourselves.