Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Philip's Commentary On

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

MEOW

MARGARET: Y’know what I feel like, Brick?  I feel all the time like a cat on a hot tin rooof!

BRICK: Then jump off the roof, jump off it, cats can jump off roofs and land on the four feet uninjured!

When:   Monday, November 12, at  7 pm and Tuesday, November 27, at  7 pm
Where:   Room 9
What:CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Who:     UUCPA Thespians
Why: To challenge ourselves with this highly intense play.

BIG DADDY is a self-made Tennessee redneck and proud of it.  He started with nothing and now owns a large plantation where he and  BIG MAMA live in a beautiful house.  The action takes place on his 65th birthday.  All of his descendents are here to celebrate:  his son BRICK and daughter-in-law MARGARET are childless;  older son GOOPER and wife MAE have brought their 5 plus “no-neck monsters” (as MARGARET calls them).

There are two highly-charged emotional questions which are never clearly stated but which are implicitly present in a great deal of the dialogue: “Does BIG DADDY have Cancer?” and  “What, exactly is BRICK’S sexual orientation?”  Near the end of Act II, the author interjects an aside:  “.  .  .  The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to ‘keep face’ in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the ‘mendacity’ that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with.  It may be the root of his collapse.  Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important.  The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s psychological problem.  I’m trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.”

How about it?  Are you up to the challenge of reading this play?  We’ll need lots of readers on each of Monday 11/12 and Tuesday 11/27.  Please make a reservation (email thespians-info@uucpa.org or call me) for one of the readings.  Or you can just show up at seven o’clock prompt and take your chances.

Philip Hodge, Chair of Thespians