Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

After sitting ignored on my shelf for two years, I recently got it in my head that I really wanted to read this. It was almost magnetic— I couldn't wait to get to it, and for some reason I was in love with Tennessee Williams before reading his works. A bit dangerous to hype yourself like that, not gonna lie. Fortunately, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ended up being better than I had dreamed of.

I love reading plays. I know many people out there much prefer watching them instead, but I prefer doing both. When watching a play, the audience sees it through other people's perspective: the director's, the actors', the stage designer's... Reading a play means you can add to it: the reader puts emphasis on certain things in their head, stops to reflect about a certain passage, takes time to decipher the different meanings of another. For me, the theater experience isn't complete without reading the actual work.

Williams here speaks about the hipocrisy within a family and the difficulty to escape it. Universal, real and raw with characters who are both preposterous and nuanced (shoutout to my gals Maggie and Big Mama, they be cool). I knew nothing about the story when I picked it up, so I was surprised by how central homosexuality is. Old timey LGBTQ+ stuff is particularly tender and painful, and this was no exception. I know this was changed in the movie but I wonder just how they did it since it's so explicit and important here!

However, the best thing about this play were definitely the stage directions. They don't give useful information for actors/directors— which is why it's so clear to me that this was written with the intention of being read. Instead they are reflective, offering background on the characters that cannot be translated to the stage. Oftentimes they are tinged with sadness and compassion, others with irony and mockery.

Reading them feels like having an intimate conversation with the playwright, as if you two were watching the Pollit family break down before your very eyes and kept a constant stream of commentary, of gossip on who they are and who they pretend to be. Williams seems to be merely an observer, someone who knows enough about the characters' pasts to understand them but still isn't privy to their inner motivations and thoughts. And that's why I fell in love with both play and playwright.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of 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.

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