How to study a play

● Drama is a special knd of writing because it needs a performance in the theatre to

arrive at a full interpretation of its meaning
○ try to imagine that you are a member of the audience when reading the play
○ think about how it could be presented on the stage, not just about the words on the page
● Drama is always about conflict of some sort
○ Identify the conflicts in the play and you will be close to identifying the large ideas or
themes which bind all the parts together
● Make careful notes on themes, character, plot and any subplots of the play
● Why do you like or dislike the characters in the play?
○ How do your feelings towards them develop and change?
● Playwrights find non-realistic ways of allowing an audience to see into the minds and
motives of their characters, for example through an aside or music
○ Consider how such dramatic devices are used in the play you are studying
● Think of the playwright writing the play
○ Why were these particular arrangements of events, characters and speeches chosen?
● Cite exact sources for all quotations, whether from the text itself or from critical
commentaries
○ Wherever possible find your own examples from the play to back up your emotions
● Where appropriate, comment in detail on the language of the passage you have quoted
● Always express youd ideas in your own words
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
EARLY LIFE

• Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His

mother, Edwina, was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman.
Williams’ father, Cornelius, was a travelling salesman for a shoe
company. According to William's brother Dakin, there was a great
deal of coldness between him and his son, who loved books but
was not interested in sports. Tennessee was close to his sister
Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age and
spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. In an effort to
treat her, Williams' parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy, a
drastic treatment that was thought to help some patients. The
operation incapacitated Rose for the rest of her life. Williams was
brought up in his grandfather's home where his parents lived.
CAREER BEGINNINGS

• The family moved to St. Louis in 1918. In 1927 Williams got

his first taste of literary fame when he won third place in a
national essay contest. In 1929, he was admitted to the
University of Missouri where he saw a production of Henrik
Ibsen's ‘Ghosts’ and decided to become a playwright. His
degree was interrupted when he was forced him to withdraw
from college and work at the International Shoe Company
where his father worked. There he worked with a young man
named Stanley Kowalski who would later resurface as a
character in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.
EDUCATION AND EARLY SUCCESS

• Eventually, Tom returned to school. In 1937, he had two of his plays produced and in 1938
graduated from the University of Iowa. After failing to find work in Chicago, he moved to
New Orleans and changed his name from "Tom" to "Tennessee" which was the state of
his father's birth. In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant, and
a year later, ‘Battle of Angels’ was produced in Boston.
LIFE AND FICTION

• Many people believe that Williams used his own experiences and familial relationships as
inspiration for his work. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes)
said of Williams, "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his
life."
PERSONAL LIFE

• Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New
Orleans. Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in
World War II, was a steadying influence in Williams' chaotic life. But in 1961, Merlo died
of Lung Cancer and the playwright went into a deep depression that lasted for ten years.
In fact, Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life. For much of this
period, he battled addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.
DEATH

• On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap at his New
York City residence at the Hotel Elysee. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri.
OBITUARY

Tennessee Williams, author of more than 24 full-length plays, including ''The Glass Menagerie,'' ''A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof'' - the latter two won Pulitzer Prizes - and ''The Night of the Iguana,'' had a profound effect on the American
theater and on American playwrights and actors. He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our
society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart. His works, which are among the most popular
plays of our time, continue to provide a rich reservoir of acting challenges. Among the actors celebrated in Williams roles were
Laurette Taylor in ''The Glass Menagerie''; Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (and Vivien Leigh in the
movie version), and Burl Ives in ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'’ ''The Glass Menagerie,'' his first success, was his ''memory play.'' Many of
his other plays were his nightmares. Although seldom intentionally autobiographical, the plays were almost all intensely personal --
torn from his own private anguishes and anxieties. He once described his sister's room in the family home in St. Louis, with her
collection of glass figures, as representing ''all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past.'' But, he remembered,
outside the room was an alley in which, nightly, dogs destroyed cats. Mr. Williams’ work, which was unequaled in passion and
imagination by any of his contemporaries' works, was a barrage of conflicts, of the blackest horrors offset by purity.
From the obituary by Mel Gussow, February 26, 1983. New York Times.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Written and published in 1955

• Genre: Family drama, tragedy

• Literary Period: Realism

• Based on Williams’ 1952 short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game”.

• Setting: Big Daddy’s plantation in the Mississippi Delta, 1950s

• Following suggestions by director, Elia Kazan, Williams rewrote Act III for the
Broadway production. This alternate version of Act III is included in our Penguin
Classics edition, supplementary to the original text.
• “Kazan had mentioned that Big Daddy seemed too important to disappear after Act II,
that Maggie wasn’t clearly likable enough, and that Brick didn’t undergo enough of a
character change.” (source: Lit Charts)

• In 1974, Williams made substantial changes to the script for a revival of the play.

• We are studying the original 1955 edition of the play.

Synopsis
• The Pollitt family have come together to celebrate the
sixty-fifth birthday of the patriarch, Big Daddy, a wealthy
cotton tycoon. Unbeknownst to Big Daddy and his wife, the
man has terminal cancer, and his two sons, Gooper and Brick,
vie for their share of the family inheritance.
• As the summer evening unfolds, the play examines
relationships within the family, primarily that between Brick
and Maggie, his wife. As unpleasant truths emerge, greed, lies,
jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling
point.
Historical Context 1/2
• In the 1950’s, the Deep South was undergoing significant
change. Approximately six million African Americans
moved from the South to urban centres in the North
during 1910-1970, in what historians have called the Great
Migration. The driving force behind the mass movement
was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and
educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the
oppression of Jim Crow.
Historical Context 2/2
• The South was beginning to experience more tension between its black and white inhabitants with the
early beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, and in farming, cotton dominance was declining as
more farmers turned towards soybeans and corn.
• The wealth and security of the cotton plantation and the easy relations between the Pollitt family and
their black help would likely not have fit into the real Mississippi Delta scene of the 1950s.
• The play does not explicitly reference its historical context, but it is possible to interpret Big Daddy’s
dying of cancer as a symbol of the Old South’s decline.
(Source: Lit Charts; National Archives)
Setting
• The play takes place in the Pollitts’ home, and the centre of the set is Brick
and Maggie’s bedroom. This is significant as the couple’s intimacy, or lack
thereof, is central to the plot of the drama.

• Williams specifies that the bedroom used to belong to the previous owners of
the plantation, a pair of bachelors, that shared the same room.

• The playwright also details that the set should not be wholly realistic.
Instead: “the walls below the ceiling should dissolve mysteriously into air;
the set should be roofed by the sky; stars and moon suggested by traces of
milky pallor, as if they were observed through a telescope lens out of focus.”
(Notes for the designer)

• The action of the story occurs in real time, approximately two hours in the
Pollitt family’s evening.
Structure of Three-act Plays
• Act I contains the setup. It is approximately the first quarter of a screenplay, and
reveals the main character, premise, and situation of the story.
• Act II contains the confrontation. It lasts for the next two quarters of the
screenplay, and clearly defines the main goal of the protagonist.
• Act III contains the resolution. This is the final quarter of the screenplay. This
answers the question as to whether or not the main character succeeded in his or
her goal.
Structure of Three-act Plays 1/3
• The first act is used for exposition, to establish the main characters, their relationships, and the
world they live in.
• Later in the first act, a dynamic incident occurs, known as the inciting incident that confronts
the protagonist.
• The protagonist's attempts to deal with this incident lead to a second and more dramatic
situation, known as the first plot point, which
• (a) signals the end of the first act,
• (b) ensures life will never be the same again for the protagonist and
• (c) raises a dramatic question that will be answered in the climax of the film. The dramatic question
should be framed in terms of the protagonist's call to action, (Will X recover the diamond? Will Y get
the girl? Will Z capture the killer?).
Structure of Three-act Plays 2/3
• The second act, also referred to as rising action, typically depicts the protagonist's
attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point, only to find
themselves in ever worsening situations.
• Part of the reason protagonists seem unable to resolve their problems is because they
do not yet have the skills to deal with the forces of antagonism that confront them. They
must not only learn new skills but arrive at a higher sense of awareness of who they are
and what they are capable of, in order to deal with their predicament, which in turn
changes who they are.
• This is referred to as character development or a character arc. This cannot be achieved
alone and they are usually aided and abetted by mentors and co-protagonists.
Structure of Three-act Plays 3/3
• The third act features the resolution of the story and its subplots. The climax is
the scene or sequence in which the main tensions of the story are brought to their
most intense point and the dramatic question answered, leaving the protagonist
and other characters with a new sense of who they really are.
Structure
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is divided into three acts.
• The play opens with Maggie and her husband, Brick Pollitt. The two are
preparing for a family dinner with Brick’s parents, his brother, Gooper, and his
brother’s sizable family.
• “All plays are about lies … when the lie is revealed, the play is over.” (David
Mamet)