Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—Tennessee Williams’ sultry southern storm of a play about greed, deceit, self-delusion, sexual desire and repression, homophobia, sexism, and the looming specter of death—has had a curious life. Indeed, you could argue that Cat has actually had three different lives since Williams dreamt it up in the early 1950s: Williams’ original text (initially buried but later revived), Elia Kazan’s original Broadway production (which won Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955), and the Paul Newman- and Elizabeth Taylor-starring movie adaptation (which, despite its Hays Code neutering, was perhaps the most sexually-charged mainstream American film of the 1950s and an Oscar-nominated phenomenon back in 1958).

Taylor is the hero and the villain of Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ sweat-soaked play about the lines of power and resentment and sexuality running through a powerful, dysfunctional Southern family, but nearly every character in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is some combination of the two.

The 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is widely regarded as Tennessee Williams’s greatest play, and in it we find an echo of many of America’s main social and political preoccupations and struggles of the 1950s. But the way Williams taps into the national psyche at a particular point in US history is subtle, and requires closer analysis. Before we offer an analysis of the play, however, it might be worth recapping the plot of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.