Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
First edition cover (New Directions)
Written by	Tennessee Williams
Characters	Margaret Brick Big Daddy Big Mama Mae/"Sister Woman" Gooper/"Brother Man" Doctor Baugh Reverend Tooker
Date premiered	March 24, 1955
Place premiered	Morosco Theatre New York City, New York
Original language	English
Subject	Death, mendacity, relationships, homosexuality, alcoholism
Genre	Drama
Setting	Brick and Margaret's room on the Pollitt plantation in Mississippi

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams. One of Williams's best-known works and his personal favorite, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the "Cat", Brick's wife.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features several recurring motifs, such as social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity, decay, sexual desire, repression, and death. Dialogue throughout is often rendered phonetically to represent accents of the Southern United States. The original production starred Barbara Bel Geddes, Burl Ives, and Ben Gazzara. The play was adapted as a motion picture of the same name in 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood recreating their stage roles. Williams made substantial excisions and alterations to the play for a revival in 1974. This has been the version used for most subsequent revivals, which have been numerous.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the story of a Southern family in crisis, especially the husband Brick and wife Margaret (usually called Maggie or "Maggie the Cat"), and their interaction with Brick's family over the course of one evening gathering at the family estate in Mississippi. The party is to celebrate the birthday of patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt, "the Delta's biggest cotton-planter", and his return from the Ochsner Clinic with what he has been told is a clean bill of health. All family members (except Big Daddy and his wife, Big Mama) are aware of Big Daddy's true diagnosis: he is dying of cancer. His family has lied to Big Daddy and Big Mama to spare the aging couple from pain on the patriarch's birthday but, throughout the course of the play, it becomes clear that the Pollitt family has long constructed a web of deceit for itself.