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The Family According to Tennessee Williams

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Comes to Farthing April 10

Story by Kathleen McFadden

If somebody started rattling them off, you’d probably recognize most of the titles of Tennessee Williams’ plays, even if you haven’t ever read them or seen the stage productions, because many of his plays were made into feature films in the 1950s and 1960s.

Think Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster in The Rose Tattoo. Geraldine Page and Laurence Harvey in Summer and Smoke. Richard Burton and Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana. Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in Streetcar Named Desire. And Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Unlike many playwrights of his day, Williams achieved phenomenal fame because his work crossed over from the stage to the screen so seamlessly, and because major film stars brought his characters to much larger audiences than his plays’ runs on Broadway could.

But Williams’ fame didn’t happen just because Hollywood made movies from his plays. Williams was an extraordinary writer and a significant trailblazer for his time, casting an unflinching eye on complex psychological themes and telling his haunting stories in such a way that they transcended their southern settings and characters, even as they were defined by them. Personal disintegration, psychological and spiritual displacement, loss of connections, loneliness, self-deception, sexuality—for Williams, no theme was too sensitive and no theme was taboo.

As part of the Southern Renaissance group that included William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Penn Warren, Williams helped redefine southern literature, building many of his themes around the old South’s lost aristocracy and the struggles to maintain a vanishing culture and strict societal norms in the emerging new South.

The overarching theme for his plays, Williams once said, is the negative impact that conventional society has upon the “sensitive nonconformist individual.”

Critically acknowledged as one of the premier playwrights of his era, Williams won two Pulitzers—one for A Streetcar Named Desire and one for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The man who became known as “Tennessee” was from Mississippi, born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Miss., on March 26, 1911. His family lived for several years in Clarksdale, Miss., before moving to St. Louis in 1918.

Williams’ first critical success came near the close of WWII in 1944 with The Glass Menagerie. Containing autobiographical elements from both his days in St. Louis, as well as from his family’s past in Mississippi, the play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award as the best play of the season.

Over the next eight years, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo and Camino Real all debuted on Broadway.

By 1955, Williams’ reputation was firmly established. That year's Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan, ran for 694 performances. The play—one of the most enduring portraits of a dysfunctional family in literature—was nominated for four Tony Awards.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof tells the story of a Southern family in crisis, focusing on the turbulent relationship between Maggie “The Cat” and her husband Brick Pollitt, and their interaction with Brick’s family during a gathering at the family estate in Mississippi. Lies and societal decay, along with alcoholism, greed, suicide and sexual desire, all figure prominently in the play.

You can see this remarkable play on stage next Thursday night, April 10, at Farthing when the Montana Repertory Theatre comes to town. Showtime is at 8:00 p.m.

Tickets are $18 for the general public, $16 for seniors, ASU faculty and staff, and $10 for students and children. Ticket prices increase at the door on show nights. For tickets or information, call the Farthing Auditorium Box Office at 828-262-4046 or click to www.pas.appstate.edu.

Want To Go?

Date: Thursday, April 10
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Farthing Auditorium, ASU
Cost: $18 general public/$16 seniors, ASU faculty and staff/$10 students and children