Tennessee Williams' Award-Winning Play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

Shing C Hau: I satisfied the goods arrived.

United States on Oct 24, 2023

Jose Carvalho: Read this in high school and offered it to my sons.

Canada on Jan 25, 2023

C. K. Almus: Once more Williams describes perfectly the characters, structures well his story and absorbs you till the end!
Interesting in both ending versions

Germany on Mar 13, 2019

Christopher Miller: This book came faster than I thought and I also read it faster than I thought I would. It came in perfect condition and it was a great read! Thank you!

Canada on Oct 04, 2018

Gary F. Taylor: Tennessee Williams frequently re-wrote his plays, and he made significant changes to CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF both before and after the Broadway debut, so there are at least three versions of the play. All three versions are set in the 1950s, in a large bed-sitting room in a Mississippi delta plantation house; all three versions require a cast of seventeen, including four children and four African-American servants; all three have a run time of about three hours including intermission.

Williams originally wrote CAT with less sympathetic Maggie, and with Big Daddy appearing only in Act Two, and with a fairly dark conclusion. Director Elia Kazan agreed to direct the play for Broadway, but strongly urged Williams make several changes. These included making Maggie more sympathetic, extending the role of Big Daddy into Act Three. Williams did not like all of Kazan’s suggestions, but he followed them, and the result was the 1955 Broadway play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Circle Award. It is the version most commonly seen in revival and the one on which the 1958 film starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor was based. In 1974 Williams re-wrote the...

United States on Mar 05, 2018

Gigi: The book if fill with underlining notes and was not kept in a good quality. Not good.

Canada on Sep 20, 2016

Margaret Carmel: This was the first Tennessee Williams play that I've ever read, so I was really interested to check it out.

And wow. This work shocked me so much more than I was expecting. Released in the 1950s, this play never leaves the confines of the Maggie and Brick's bedroom but tackles issues of homosexuality, hypocrisy, marriage, escapism, love, lies, and the confines of manliness.

Over the course of the novel the characters are constantly battling with truths that lurk just beneath the surface. Brick's love for his friend Skipper, Big Daddy's illness, and Maggie's frustrations of being a married woman all work to create an image of 1950s southern America struggling to find it's footing in a shifting moral world. I loved how Big Mama believed that if Brick and Maggie just had a child, then these problems would melt away. This representation of the Southern ideals of traditional families and inheritances flying in the face of reality is just as telling today as it was 60 years ago.

Can't wait to read more Williams.

United States on Jul 08, 2015

B. Wilfong: This is a superbly written play about that most basic of human issues, the desire to communicate honestly and openly with someone that you care about. At its core, Tennessee Williams' masterpiece is really about nothing more than that. Everyone wants and needs someone to listen to, and accept, you.
All of Williams' plays are about lonely people when you come right down to it. However, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is unique in that these lonely characters are part of a large family, and at times are literally tripping over each other. What makes us lonely is our inability to communicate with those that we love. It is in that essential human drive that Williams creates the tragedy of this piece. A father knows his son is a closeted gay man; he loves him, but can't get the son to believe or accept that. A wife knows the truth about her husband, but can't make herself believe it. (Actually that last one applies to two wives in the play, for different reasons.) A man faces death, in essence alone, because he can't admit how terrified he is. And the list goes on. These are the stories of the Pollitt family of the Mississippi Delta. Those particulars are different for all of us, but the...

United States on Oct 25, 2011