Word: cat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theater audiences have notoriously short memories. When Cat was first mounted, Williams was widely deemed a purveyor of sex, sensationalism and violence; the play was found shocking, with most of the talk focussed on homosexuality and the inclusion of a bawdy joke about an elephant's erection...
This opening up has the advantage of allowing us to go back to a work like Cat with a balanced perspective. Sure, homosexuality is a factor in the play; but we can now more easily appreciate that it is not the central subject. Only last year, shortly after publicly acknowledging his own homosexuality, Williams stated, "I have never found the subject of homosexuality a satisfactory theme for a full-length play...
...Cat, like most of Williams's plays, casts its net far wider, exploring a number of major themes: illusion and reality and the impact idealism has on them (there is a lesson in the fact that, in this matter, Williams and O'Neill--in The Iceman Cometh--could take opposing positions and both be convincing); the need to overcome isolation and the obstacles to communication and worthy personal relationships; the nature of power, both materialistic and spiritual; and sexual conflict and guilt (heterosexual as well as homosexual). As often with Williams, disease and neurosis and death are also involved...
...earlier Glass Menagerie and Streetcar remain his finest achievements. But Cat ranks next, and had no trouble making a strong initial impact. It copped the Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize, not to mention an unexpected accolade from Fidel Castro. It is sad that, in the ensuing two decades, Williams has, for all his activity, not produced another first-rate work, and we have had only a series of rehashings and fitful flickerings. But nothing can detract from the luster of his early masterpieces...
...Cat plunges us into a predatory Southern family not unlike the Hubbard household so splendidly limned by Lillian Hellman in Another Part of the Forest and The Little Foxes. At the head is Big Daddy Pollitt, who has amassed a fortune of nearly $10-million, never stops bragging about his "28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile," and is unaware he has terminal cancer. He loathes his wife, Big Mama, with whom his sex life has been no doublebed of roses...