Cat-o'-Nine-Tails for the Fair Sex
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Cat-o'-Nine-Tails For the Fair Sex A DISTINGUISHED British playwright and novelist, on a recent visit to America, complained to me that the London stage had...
...On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Cat-o'-Nine-Tails For the Fair Sex A DISTINGUISHED British playwright and novelist, on a recent visit to America, complained to me that the London stage had been taken over by homosexuality and that this is insidiously intrenching itself on Broadway...
...With which unmotivated and unlikely resolve the curtain falls...
...At this point, Tea Without Sympathy shifts to Another Part of the Forest...
...Homosexuality, self-deceit and greed are heaped on in succession, but not one of the problems is resolved...
...If it be an accomplishment to describe the town dump so that we smell the garbage, Williams's claptrap may be hailed...
...Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...
...And his daughters-in-law are ready to wrestle over every acre...
...There never were such wanton idiots as the four children who come upon the scene only to interrupt the adults with hideous clamor...
...Director Kazan, with offstage noise of servants, with music and fireworks, has helped foster an hypnotic mood—which is broken by the screeching of Mildred Dunnock as Big Mama...
...In neither are we drawn to the slightest sympathy with any of the figures, being rather repelled by a picture that only scratches the surface and reveals only sores...
...But at least over the dump, as not over this rooftop, we can look up and see the stars...
...Among the characteristic aspects of this theme are a sneering at motherhood and marriage, a dislike of the "brats" we miscall children, an absence of warmth and tenderness, a flaunting of sex without love...
...Whether she lies to comfort the dying Daddy or to get hold of the estate we never learn...
...Brick's elder brother presses on Big Mama a document giving him control of the estate...
...in Lillian Hellmaniac fury, the little foxes, the prospective heirs, turn to rend one another...
...when he looks at the amorous elephant—and he doesn't mean its trunk—brought almost as many feminine cackles as the tale of the Cotton Queen who looked up from her float in the Memphis parade while the man in the hotel squirted tobacco juice down on her...
...by the obtrusive Southern accent of Barbara Bel Geddes, working hard to give reality to Margaret...
...but the imbecilic adoration of their mother and the unnatural beastliness of "Big Daddy," their grandfather, quite match their irresponsibility...
...Big Daddy not only sweeps his grandchildren away...
...she, of course, being only Daddy's puppet, cannot act alone...
...But neither the characters nor their story grows into a unified power...
...After an act and a half, Daddy makes his Brack face up to the truth of his feelings for his dead teammate...
...At the Morosco Theater...
...Daddy says he has never been able to endure Big Mama, and he's glad he has fornications left to lavish elsewhere...
...Several repetitive monologues and the father-and-son scene belong in one play...
...All these are thrust upon us in Tennessee Williams's new opus, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.* Williams's play begins as a Tea Without Sympathy—save that in the deep South the "tea" is bourbon and the man who doesn't know whether he's a homosexual is married, though he holds true to his dead friend's memory by not sleeping with his wife...
...We are told, insistently, that the one thing pure in Brick's life has been his relationship with his old teammate, and surely all else in the play is foul...
...Such things, and the foul names applied to women and children, evoke fitful laughter, in dialogue notable otherwise for constant repetition...
...Directed by Elin Kazan...
...The story of the little boy who cries "What's that...
...Brick gets back at Daddy by telling him that the doctor's report is a lie: Daddy really is dying of cancer...
...By avoiding the four-letter word (except that for a camel's back), the play achieves a coarse suggestiveness that wakes a responsive chord in some of the Broadway audience...
...Daddy is, as we are told almost once for each square mile, owner of 28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the Nile Valley...
...and by the explosive irruptions of the "no-neck" children...
...but Brick, whose boast is his devotion to the truth, is so won by his wife's false declaration that he determines then and there to make it true...
...Prosented by the Playwrights' Company...
...It has been said that, stripped of its poetry, Hamlet would sound like trash...
...the battle over the succession, in another...
...It does have a seductive production, with light as though filtered through tall Venetian blinds, into a bedroom with one angle jutting into the orchestra, so that a character can stand looking into the mirror on the invisible wall and talk to the audience...
...Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has no poetry...
...The acting of Burl Ives as Daddy has an effective coarse complacence, and the restraint of Ben Gazzarra as Brick suggests that he could plumb depths the play does not grant him...
...he talks of his wife, to his son, with callous candor: The terms he employs of his forty-years' companion would shiver the spine of anyone as sensitive as Brick is supposed to be (and his mother's darling...
...Daddy comes in, whereupon Margaret falls at his knees, offering him her gift—oh yes, this is his birthday!—his unborn grandchild, son of the man who has not been sleeping with her...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 14
