Writing on a Hot Tin Roof

In my edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Penguin Classics, 2001) Tennessee Williams issued a challenge, of sorts. He provided two versions of the play's third and final act: the original version, and the version which first appeared to the public on Broadway. Both acts concern the future of ‘Big Daddy’s’ plantation (who of his sons and their spouses will own what of his fortune) now that he is dying of cancer, and the reveal of that fact to his wife, ‘Big Mama’. Beyond this a number of substantial changes were undergone, due to the influence of the director Elia Kazan. Williams left it to the reader, if they so wished, to decide the better version. And, as I like a challenge…

On reading I found myself strongly inclined towards the original. I think this is partly because I had the first of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium in mind. Calvino talks of the virtue of 'Lightness' in literature. He looks at flow, the ‘lightning of language’, subtle processes at work, and visual/symbolic meaning (and goes on to make you feel very poorly read with his extensive examples). For him Lightness means to have precision and determination, not vagueness and the haphazard. To emphasise this view he quotes the French Poet-Philosopher Paul Valéry, ‘Il faut être léger comme l'oiseau et non comme la plume’ (One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather).

To put my view simply, I think the original Cat has the edge because it has what Calvino terms the ‘secret of lightness’.

The first fundamental alteration of Act 3, from original to Broadway, is the character of Brick. In Act 2 he had a long discussion with his father, Big Daddy, which progressively uncovered the root of his drinking problem: While recuperating from injury in hospital his best friend phoned to confess sexual confusion, and possible homosexual feelings. In response Brick hung up on him. The bedside phone rang, rang, rang. Until it stopped and his best friend committed suicide. Brick’s own sexual feelings, while suggested, are left ambiguous to the audience, as he condemns of the 'mendacity' (meaning liars and lying culture) of not only the world, but himself.

Kazan felt that Brick should undergo a kind of mutation, not present in the original, following this interview. Unfortunately by giving this discussion additional weight the dynamics of the final act entirely change. Brick goes from being his usual charmingly detached self to a person considering Rainbow Hill (the then-equivalent of rehab). His relationship with his wife also shows some vague sign of vitality, rather than tragically mirroring Big Mama’s simple minded devotion to her affectionless husband. Tennessee Williams (as he notes in my copy of the play) felt no conversation, no matter how revelatory, could ever affect an immediate change of heart in someone in such a state of spiritual disrepair. I tend to agree, and find Brick’s stubbornness – or perhaps, more accurately, moral paralysis – far more representative of our flawed reality.

This ‘weighty’ addition reverberates throughout the act, causing all sorts of other changes. For example, the Preacher’s character suffers. Rather than being blatantly vulture-like, by hinting at his church’s need for ventilation and new robes (as he, a holy man, is just there to benefit from Big Daddy’s death like everyone else), he is all but removed from the act in the Broadway version, in preference of a few more lines from the family Doctor about Brick’s alcohol recovery. Something subtle, but powerful, has thus been lost.

The second most fundamental change again concerns the addition of weight. In the Broadway version Big Daddy returns in Act 3. He brings with him a quip about the briefcase that belongs to Gooper, Brick's older brother, 'being a whole load of nothin'; an analogy veiled so thinly that even Big Mama is not fooled, of an old elephant having a few fornifications left in him; and then he takes to the roof, adorned in cashmere, for a 'last look at his kingdom'. It is all rather crude, sentimental, and underwhelming – especially when compared with his powerful presence and anger in the preceding act, which reaches apex when he is finally told by Brick at the end of Act 2 that he does in fact have cancer 'ALL – LYING SONS OF – LYING BITCHES!'

By contrast, in the original Act 3 Big Daddy did not appear at all. Tennessee Williams wrote in his Memoirs, ‘I had to violate my own intuition by having Big Daddy re-enter the stage in Act Three. I saw nothing for him to do in the act when he re-entered and I did not think it was dramatically proper that he should re-enter.’ However, it was felt by Kazan that Big Daddy was too vivid and important a character to disappear from the play, except as an offstage cry. I strongly feel otherwise, and will do my best to explain the power of the original.

To explain I need again relate to Calvino’s virtue of lightness. One of the many examples Calvino shares is of Don Quixote being hoisted by a windmill, after driving his lance through a sail. It is [Calvino claims] one of the most quoted pieces in literature, but spans only a few lines, and took minimal resources on the part of the author. According to Calvino some scenes are impressed on our memories not with their words, but by their implications. Consider now Big Daddy’s sole contribution to the original Act 3: [A long drawn cry of agony and rage fills the house. Margaret turns phonograph down to a whisper. / The cry is repeated.] The family bicker, whilst the once imposing man is despairing elsewhere. I cannot think of a more powerful way of underscoring key themes of greed, family/social dysfunction, and mental anguish. Its power is ultimately derived from implication; the vacuous black hole of absence; and the audience’s imagination, where it will linger long after the final curtain has fallen.

The method of imposing a similar sense of greed, dysfunction, and anguish in the Broadway version is to employ what they call ‘pathetic fallacy’. If you are unfamiliar with the term it means the giving of a non-human object (such as--but not limited to--the weather) human emotions. In this case a storm begins outside as Gooper expresses his intention of fighting a legal battle over the plantation, if necessary, in interest of ‘fairness’. A number of minor characters (black servants), who are absent from the original, are also cumbersomely introduced at this time to show the impact of this weather – after all, the interior of Gooper’s Cadillac mustn’t be allowed to get wet. In this case the term 'pathetic fallacy' could reasonably be interpreted pejoratively.

To be clear, in learning from Cat I do not want to create the illusion a writer always knows best. Williams himself said ‘No living playwright, that I can think of, hasn't something to learn about his own work from a director so keenly perceptive as Elia Kazan’. Collaboration, done carefully and respectfully, is a very important part of the creative process. Nevertheless, even while Cat was very successful on Broadway, no doubt in part thanks to Kazan, one cannot help but wonder if Williams sacrificed too much to ensure Kazan’s participation? Perhaps he would have benefitted from holding out for longer, as a writer, on the hot tin roof? Instead he made changes, with which he did not agree, and some artistic integrity was sacrificed for mainstream success.

That said, and to prove there is no definitive rule at work here, there are examples where a director’s significant alteration has been preferred to the source material. I have Stanley Kubrick’s film adaption of the novel A Clockwork Orange in mind (although admit a rewatch/re-read is necessary in order to better establish my own opinion). Interestingly Clockwork concerned the subtraction, rather than the addition, of weight, as the final chapter was removed in favour of a more plainly pessimistic ending. This also pissed off the original author, Anthony Burgess, but perhaps that is a tangent for another time.

What I most want to stress in this article is the danger of imposing weight. This is something all those working in creative fields need be aware of. Cat becomes very busy, bloated, and heavy, in its third Act on Broadway. I think that there is much to be said for Lightness, and the saying that sometimes less – in the form of bird, rather than feather – is more.