Three Plays (21 page)

MARGARET
[as she hears Brick's exhalation]
: The click?

[Brick looks toward the singers, happily, almost gratefully. He crosses to bed, picks up his pillow, and starts toward head of couch. Margaret seizes the pillow from his grasp, holding it close. Brick watches her with growing admiration. She moves quickly throwing pillow on to bed. She crosses to bar. She grabs all the bottles from the bar. She pitches the bottles, one after the other, off the platform into the lawn. Bottles break. Margaret re-enters the room, stands facing Brick.]

Echo Spring has gone dry, and no one but me could drive you to town for more.

BRICK
: Lacey will get me—

MARGARET
: Lacey's been told not to!

BRICK
: I could drive—

MARGARET
: And you lost your driver's license! I'd phone ahead and have you stopped on the highway before you got halfway to Ruby Lightfoot's gin mill. I told a lie to Big Daddy, but we can make that lie come true. And then I'll bring you liquor, and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into! What do you say? What do you say, baby?

BRICK
: I admire you, Maggie.

[Brick sits on edge of bed. He looks up at the overhead light, then at Margaret. She reaches for the light, turns it out; then she kneels quickly beside Brick at foot of bed.]

MARGARET
: Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of—and I can! I'm determined to do it—and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof—is there? Is there, baby?

[She touches his cheek gently.]

CURTAIN

THE END

SHORT BIO

Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis som
e years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Baby Doll (1957), Orpheus Descending (1957), Something Unspoken (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960) and Small Craft Warnings (1972). Tennessee Williams died in 1983.

Peter Shaffer has written of Tennessee Williams: 'He was a born dramatist as few are ever born. Whatever he put on paper, superb or superfluous, glorious or gaudy, could not fail to be electrifyingly actable. He could not write a dull scene.... Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself.'

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1st published in Great Britain by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd. 1956

Published in Penguin Books 1957

PERSON—TO—PERSON

Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it.

It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emoti
ons that stir him deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself, that special world, the passions and images of it that each of us weaves about him from birth to death, a web of monstrous complexity, spun forth at a speed that is incalculable to a length beyond measure, from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.

It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.'

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

I once saw a group of little girls on a Mississippi sidewalk, all dolled up in their mothers' and sisters' cast-off finery, old raggedy ball gowns and plumed hats and high-heeled slippers, enacting a meeting of ladies in a parlour with a perfect mimicry of polite Southern gush and simper. But one child was not satisfied with the attention paid her enraptured performance by the others, they were too involved in their own performances to suit her, so she stretched out her skinny arms and threw back her skinny neck and shrieked to the deaf heavens and her equally oblivious playmates, 'Look at me, look at me, look at me!'

And then her mother's high-heeled slippers threw her off balance and she fell to the sidewalk in a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net, and still nobody looked at her.

I wonder if she is not, now, a Southern writer.

Of course it is not only Southern writers, of lyrical bent, who engage in such histrionics and shout, 'Look at me!' Perhaps it is a parable of all artists. And not always do we topple over and land in a tangle of trappings that don't fit us. However, it is well to be aware of that peril, and not to content yourself with a demand for attention, to know that out of your personal lyricism, your sidewalk histrionics, something has to be created that will not only attract observers but participants in the performance.

I try very hard to do that.

The fact that I want you to observe what I do for your possible pleasure and to give you knowledge of things that I feel I may know better than you, because my world is different from yours, as different as every man's world is from the world of others, is not enough excuse for a personal lyricism that has not yet mastered its necessary trick of rising above the singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import. But for years and years now, which may have passed like a dream because of this obsession, I have been trying to learn how to perform this trick and make it truthful, and sometimes I feel that I am able to do it. Sometimes, when the enraptured street-corner performer in me cries out 'Look at me!', I feel that my hazardous footwear and fantastic regalia may not quite throw me off balance. Then, suddenly, you fellow-performers in the sidewalk show may turn to give me your attention and allow me to hold it, at least for the interval between 8:40 and 11 something p.m.

Eleven years ago this month of March, when I was far closer than I knew, only nine months away from that long-delayed, but always expected, something that I lived for, the time when I would first catch and hold an audience's attention, I wrote my first preface to a long play. The final paragraph went like this:

'There is too much to say and not enough time to say it. Nor is there power enough. I am not a good writer. Sometimes I am a very bad writer indeed. There is hardly a successful writer in the field who cannot write circles around me, but I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action. I want to work more and more with a more plastic theatre than the one I have (worked with) before. I have never for one moment doubted that there are people—millions!—to say things to. We come to each other, gradually, but with love. It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.'

This characteristically emotional, if not rhetorical, statement of mine at that time seems to suggest that I thought of myself as having a highly personal, even intimate relationship with people who go to see plays. I did and I still do. A morbid shyness once prevented me from having much direct communication with people, and possibly that is why I began to write to them plays and stories. But even now when that tongue-locking, face-flushing, silent and crouching timidity has worn off with the passage of the troublesome youth that it sprang from, I still find it somehow easier to 'level with' crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony sections of theatres than with individuals across a table from me. Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to.

Of course I know that I have sometimes presumed too much upon corresponding sympathies and interest in those to whom I talk boldly, and this has led to rejections that were painful and costly enough to inspire more prudence. But when I weigh one thing against another, an easy liking against a hard respect, the balance always tips the same way, and whatever the risk of being turned a cold shoulder, I still don't want to talk to people only about the surface aspects of their lives, the sort of things that acquaintances laugh and chatter about on ordinary social occasions.

I feel that they get plenty of that, and heaven knows so do I, before and after the little interval of time in which I have their attention and say what I have to say to them. The discretion of social conversation, even among friends, is exceeded only by the discretion of 'the deep six', that grave wherein nothing is mentioned at all. Emily Dickinson, that lyrical spinster of Amherst, Massachusetts, who wore a strict and savage heart on a taffeta sleeve, commented wryly on that kind of posthumous discourse among friends in these lines:

I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed? ' For beauty,' I replied. 'And I for truth,—the two are one, We brethren are' be said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.

Meanwhile!—I want to go on talking to you as freely and intimately about what we live and die for as if I knew you better than anyone else whom you know.

- TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

EDITORIAL NOTE

I saw this play on Broadway. It contains some passages on sexual matters which are extremely outspoken and some of the audience of which I was a member indulged in Bacchanalian laughte
r; appropriately, these Maenads were female. This was the only source of embarrassment in the evening; the play itself caused none, for its harshness and crudities are an authentic part of its life. Tennessee Williams does for his country and generation something of what J. M. Synge did for Ireland. Here is life in the raw, the springs of vitality revealed at once in their animalism and in their poetry. To an Englishman, he opens a vision of the size of America, the huge fertility which can place apparently inexhaustible power in a man's hands... 'twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile'. Big Daddy is a patriarch: he reminds one of a character in Genesis (perhaps from the less frequently quoted chapters); he has the same warmth of the soil in him. The best poetry of the play is in his speeches, which distil the wisdom of primitive human nature.

Brick and his Cat, the centers of the drama, vibrate in their desperation with the heat of the South. The family is clothed with the atmosphere of the South as with a garment. It is caged in the hot, thin-walled house, a prison amid the vast, rich lands around it. Tennessee Williams' use of repetition to create a prison of words is extraordinarily skilful: words beat like a tattoo on the heart, yet the beat is subtly changed at each hearing. This evocative quality of rhythm again reminds one of Synge. Perhaps it is no accident that in both writers the quality springs from a sad soil....

American drama, as it comes to maturity, enlarges the horizons of the theatre.

- E. MARTIN BROWNE

New York, October 1956

STAGE CAST

The original Broadway production, which opened in 1955, was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie; Ben Gazzara as Brick; Burl Ives as Big Daddy; Mildred Dunnock a
s Big Mama; Pat Hingle as Gooper; and Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. Bel Geddes was the only cast member nominated for a Tony Award, and Kazan was nominated for Best Director of a Play. Both Ives and Sherwood would reprise their roles in the 1958 film version. The cast also featured the southern blues duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry and had as Gazzara's understudy the young Cliff Robertson. - Wikipedia

MOVIE CAST

The big-screen version of the play was made in 1958 by MGM, and starred Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson. Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprised their stage r
oles. The Hays Code limited how clearly the film could portray Brick's past sexual desire for Skipper, and thus diminished the original play's critique of homophobia and sexism. Although it was very discreet in referring to the supposed homosexual themes, and although it had a somewhat revised "third act", it was highly acclaimed and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman both received Oscar nominations for their performances, and most critics agreed that the film provided both them and Burl Ives with their finest screen roles up to that time. Curiously, Burl Ives was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that year, and won, but not for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won it for his role in the epic Western The Big Country. Reportedly, MGM executives had mistakenly put Ives' name in the wrong category during the Academy Award nominations process, although Ives could certainly be said to have played a supporting role in Cat. It is possible that Cat may have been too controversial for the Academy voters - the film won no Oscars, and the Best Picture award went to Gigi that year. - Wikipedia