Bingo: Play
I have always loved Tennessee Williams, and his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof did not diminish that love. A somewhat short play in three acts, the story revolves around a Southern family marked by repression, thwarted love, and the ties that bind.
The play opens in the bedroom of Brick and Maggie, a couple in a sexless marriage. Brick is a member of the wealthy Southern family that owns the house. He is an alcoholic who represses his feelings and communication and suffers with self disgust. Maggie is the woman who loves him and craves his attention in bed and out of it. Maggie is a dramatic truth-teller, married into a family that rests on “mendacity” (as Brick later puts it) and denial. In the first act, Brick and Maggie argue (mostly Maggie argues–Brick affects indifference) about their lack of sex, their childless marriage, and Brick’s old college friend Skipper who revealed his non-platonic love of Brick and when rejected drank himself to death. It is interesting to note that Tennessee Williams did not see Brick as a closeted gay man. But rather, a straight man who reacted to his friend’s declaration of love with no compassion, for which he punishes himself with alcohol and seeks the “click” of peace being drunk gives him.
The second act revolves mostly around Big Daddy, Brick’s father, and Brick. Other family play a role, mostly showing their machinations around Big Daddy’s wealth (Gooper, Brick’s older brother, and his wife Mae and their five children) and the way Big Mama, Big Daddy’s wife, refuses to accept Big Daddy’s disdain and cruelty towards her. Big Daddy is bigger than life, vulgar and bossy, but also very afraid of his own mortality. The play takes place on his birthday, where he falsely believes he doesn’t have cancer after a visit to the doctor’s. Maggie knows the truth and reveals Big Daddy’s terminal illness to Brick in the first act. Big Daddy and Brick have a long conversation in which Big Daddy tries to approach his son’s drinking and the tragedy of Skipper’s death. Brick lashes out, saying he knows people thought they were both gay, but that he cut Skipper off. Big Daddy is surprisingly accepting; throughout the play it is clear Brick is the only one he truly loves. Brick complains that when Big Daddy wants to have a conversation, it’s always about nothing. He then implies Big Daddy is in fact sick, which devastates his father.
In the third and final act the family, a local reverend, and the doctor gather. Big Daddy ultimately understands he’s terminal, and spurns his greedy son Gooper and his wife. At one point, Maggie lies and says she’s pregnant, to lift Big Daddy’s spirits up. The play ends with Maggie hiding all of Brick’s alcohol and throwing the crutch he uses to walk away, to force him to make love to her.
So many of the themes are captured in one of Maggie’s lines:
When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant…”
This play was first produced in the fifties; it’s noticeably frank about sex and sexuality, which was interesting. I kind of want to see the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Neuman now.