Word: brickes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...third act that proved troublesome. In order to assure the play's production, Williams felt compelled to knuckle under to director Elia Kazan's desires that Big Daddy return on-stage in the last act, that Brick undergo a change of character as a result of Act II, and that Maggie become more sympathetic. Williams saw some merit only in the last, but went along with all three. In Kazan's production, Big Daddy came back to hear Maggie's false claim of pregnancy and to tell a smutty joke. This was a half-hearted compliance...
...revised version, Brick seems at the very end to be headed for a reconciliation of sorts with Maggie, as he did not in the original script. This did do some damage, and Williams knew it. He was quite right in stating, "I don't believe that a conversation, however revelatory, ever effects so immediate a change in the heart or even conduct of a person in Brick's state of spiritual disrepair." When the play was published, Williams took care to include both versions of the third...
...Daddy does come back; the thunderstorm has been curtailed; Gooper reinstates his witticism about Big Mama's double chin; and Brick ends the play, as he originally did, by being more ambiguous and less conclusive. The text can now, I think, in its fourth version be considered final. If there seems to be, generally, too much repetition of words and phrases, that's just the result of (my) personal taste...
Keir Dullea's Brick is fine all the way. For a long time this is a thankless role: Brick has little chance to play; he functions more as a mannikin than as a man. But it takes considerable skill and attentiveness to convey Brick's inattentiveness convincingly, whether he is just lying down with closed eyes, gazing off into space, or whistling about the light of the silvery moon, quite oblivious of what Maggie is saying. Eventually he is goaded into action, and uses a chair as a circus lion-tamer does. In the great scene with Big Daddy...