Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

When Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theatre in 1955 it starred Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie, and folk singer Burl Ives (in his first dramatic production) as Big Daddy. Reviewers considered the play a powerhouse of emotion and they recognized that Williams had broken out of the slump he had been in since his success with A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. But they refused him unequivocal praise; instead, many of them chided Williams for toying around the edges of the play's "real" topic: homosexuality.

Walter Kerr, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, praised the performers only to accuse Williams of being "less than candid," of mislaying or deliberately hiding the "key" to the play. Eric Bentley, in New York magazine, noted too much concern about how everyone is doing in bed and declared that a writer has a duty not to be vague and unequivocal about his true topic. Although, in a 1955 interview with Arthur Waters for Theatre Arts, Williams flatly denied that Brick was a homosexual, a few sentences later he admitted that Brick felt some "unrealized abnormal tendencies" at "some time in his life." Of course, this interview could only serve to reaffirm a belief that Williams was ambivalent about the topic and that this ambivalence carried through to his play. Another fifteen years would pass before Williams would publicly discuss his own homosexuality, and his admission would do little to defray the commonly held opinion that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fails to engage the topic of homosexuality forthrightly. When the play was revived nineteen years after its initial opening, in a more sexually liberated America, the furor over the topic of homosexuality had abated, and both the language and the Pollitts' dramatic problems seemed more quaint than shocking.

Reviews of the 1974 revival shifted in focus but were no less harsh than the 1955 reviews. John Simon wrote in New York that the play was "worthy commercial fare, but not art," and he found fault with symbolism that recurred "ad nauseum." Simon called Brick a "nonentity," whose realization that the mendacity he hates is his own is made ambiguous by Williams's failure to explain whether Brick betrayed "his friend or his homosexuality." Other...