Word: brickely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Daddy's elder son, Gooper, is a greedy lawyer slavering to inherit the estate, and is married to Mae, a snotty and equally money-minded mother of an ever-expanding obnoxious brood of "no-neck monsters." The younger son, Brick, is an ex-athlete fallen into alcoholism, who refuses to become involved with anyone, including his wife Maggie. She is thus not only sexually frustrated and childless but, born into poverty, also fearful of losing the wealth into which she married. On the sidelines is the Reverend Tooker, a local clergyman adept at sniffing a fat bequest for a church...
Although the cast contains some fifteen players, the core of the play--again as in Greek drama--lies in big duologues separated by choral passages (sometimes literal offstage singing). The first act, like the others, takes place in the combination bed-sitting-room occupied by Maggie and Brick, and it belongs almost exclusively to them. In fact, we have here not so much a duologue as a monologue by Maggie, for she talks more at him than with him. Brick, whose tippling has resulted in a broken leg, is always physically present, with crutch and cast, but his mind...
...second act, the galvanic Big Daddy won't tolerate Brick's detachment. The two of them, alone on stage, have a knock-down drag-out dispute in the tradition of the Greek agon. This is the most powerful scene in the play, and one of the most powerful in modern drama. Williams is often at his most effective when he is autobiographical. Tom and Laura in Menagerie were modeled on the playwright and his introverted sister Rose, who had to be institutionalized for life. The confrontation in Cat was his way of trying to exorcise the demonic memory...
Here, with persistent and painful probing, Big Daddy pries out of Brick a reason for his refuge in alcohol: disgust at the world's hypocrisy--or "mendacity," as Brick puts it. Part of this disgust is self-disgust at the outcome of Brick's "pure and true" friendship with his now-dead football pal Skipper, a relationship that was homosexual on one side and, at least latently, on the other. Forced to face truth, Brick turns the tables and reveals that what Big Daddy thinks is a spastic colon is actually a metastasizing malignancy...
...Nice Boy." Martin Luther King Sr., 74, was just entering the red brick church as his wife was shot. When he asked Chenault why he did it, the youth replied: "Because she was a Christian and all Christians are my enemies." The next day Chenault declared that his real name was "Servant Jacob." "I am a Hebrew," he said. "I was sent here on a purpose and it's partly accomplished...