New Play in Manhattan

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (by Tennessee Williams) shows again what potentialities its author has and demonstrates what power. But it remains a demonstration rather than an achievement. There is no question how hard Williams can hit, or how vividly he can write, or that, in a theater full of feigned and borrowed emotions, his are honestly hot and angry. But his own feelings, often intemperate, work against him. Perhaps it is the revenge of an age of violence on those who mirror it, that they should themselves seem violent where they mean to be intense, should too often mistake blind assault for implacable pursuit.

The scene of the play is the Mississippi Delta plantation of a lusty, crude, aging millionaire who does not know he is dying of cancer. He has two sons, one an utter mediocrity, scheming with his petty wife for the estate. Brick, the other son (Ben Gazzara) and father's favorite, has taken to drink and refuses himself to the wife he hates--the wife who intimated there was something unnatural between him and his now-dead closest friend. In an atmosphere of conjugal and family pretenses, accusations and resentments. Brick and his father, during a lacerating scene, blurt out some ugly truths. Thereafter other revelations--about sex, illness, greed, dislike--spill forth during tense family scenes.

The play often has stings; indeed, so much of it is harsh and blunt and bitter that intervals of financial conniving which challenge The Little Foxes for meanness have here almost an air of comic relief.

Much of Elia Kazan's staging adds force and vividness, and so does much of the acting--particularly Burl Ives as the doomed father and Barbara Bel Geddes as the desperate wife, insecure as a cat on a hot tin roof.

Yet the play, closing on a lame, stagy note, lacks stature. Perhaps there is a little too much of everything: Williams is not only lavish of suffering, but voluble in articulating it. There might well be less emotionalism and should certainly be fewer words, particularly profane ones: the profanity often seems to relieve Williams' own feelings rather than his characters'. But more important, Cat never quite defines itself as chiefly a play about a marriage, about a family, or about a man. And if it means to be a complex of all three, it needs sharper form, greater unity, a sense of something far more deeply interfused.

Ultimately, indeed, the trouble seems to lie with the method rather than the materials. A sense of theater is one of Playwright Williams' great gifts, as it is part of Director Kazan's genius. But perhaps their constant dual reliance on so galvanic but gaudy a virtue finally turns it into something of a vice. The play, in exchange for abounding in theatrical trapdoors, loses the slow, relentless, staircase-climb of drama. Too much explodes, too little uncoils; much more is highlighted than truly plumbed. There is no law that the more sick and tormented the subject matter, the more severe should be the approach; but even most of Elizabethan drama, for all its blaze of poetry, foundered from an undisciplined portrayal of disordered lives. The disturbed people in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof seldom become truly disturbing; the audience merely reacts where it should be made to respond.

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