McDermott on Prize Play

Pulitzer Must Be Growling in Grave Over Cat on Hot Tin Roof Winning His Award

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BY WILLIAM F. MCDERMOTT

S ANNOUNCED in Tuesday's newspapers, the Pulitzer prize for the best play of the Broadway theatrical season went to Tennessee Williams? "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." The great publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, who founded and financed these annual awards

must be growling in his grave. He never saw a play of

this sort and he would not have approved of it is he had.

He lived in a different moral climate than that which now environs the theater. His original will stipulated something to the effect that the prize for drama should go to that play which best represented the educational value of the stage and its usefulness in raising the standards of morals and good taste.

Nobody could accuse "Cat on

Hot Tin Roof" of contributing mous theatrical power. I do not

to these honor-

able causes. For years, the Pulitzer board has ignored the original conditions of Pulitzer bequest and even changed the ground rules he set forth.

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know whether or not Williams is a great playwright, and I suspect that he isn't. But he has an extraordinary and masterful command of the devices of the theater and a way of creating an interlacing byplay of character and situation which is both admirable and intensely moving. the Mississippi Delta and they As a theatrical piece, "Cat on exist in an aura of greed, misa Hot Tin Roof," will bowl you understanding, and latent hate.. I wish Williams would over. It lashes the feelings and around to the interpretation of be ruled by the hands of the it stuns the sense with recogdead. Everything passes. nizable and unpleasant truth. Since Pulitzer's day, the Williams has a touch for the drama in some of its aspects mystery and agony of human life has emerged from sentimental-not equaled by a dramatist since Eugene O'Neill was silented. ity and sweetness into a cult of the pessimistic and the ugly

That is not objectionable. Life

WILLIAM F.

and art cannot MCDERMOTT

There is

There are some things wrong with his prize play. The ending

more normal people, but he does

what he must do, and he does it with shattering effectiveness.

Theme Is Homosexuality The underlying theme of the play is homosexuality. The hero retains a strange and perhaps

ugliness Sometimes beauty in is not quite clear, or right, in abnormal affection for a friend

atrical art.

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"Cat on a Hot Tin respect to the body of the drama, who has died. This relationship Roof" deals with the ugly but and there is some ambiguity in causes him to hate his wife, who it has beauty as a piece of thethe action, as several critics assumes to know his secret. have pointed out. But it has a You are never quite sure that smashing theatrical, power and the hero is homosexual, though its characters are wonderfully the evidence suggests that he is. well-drawn in respect to their. I gathered that he was free from his anxieties and malice when

Is Black, Brooding Play Nobody can deny its distinction in this respect. It is a special environment. black, brooding play of enor· They live on a plantation on he confessed his abnormality to

7.

his father and to himself, but that conclusion may be wrong.

The play essentially concerns the decay of a family in the south of the United States. De-. cay is perhaps the wrong word. The head of the household, a very rich man, is not at all decayed.

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He is forceful and ruthless and pitiful only when he is faced with death of which he had abnormal fear. But the general effect of the play is one of decadence and a strange rot of mind and heart.

The long and clumsy title comes from the resentment and despair of the woman who believes that she is married to a homosexual, and can't have children. She is like a cat walking on a hot tin roof

* * g* !

This may not be a great play, or even the best play of the season as it has been cited by both the Pulitzer prize board and the New York Critics' Circle. I know that it is a fine and moving play as presented at Morosco theater in New

the

York.

What I don't know is to what extent the wonderful acting by Barbara Bel Geddes, Burl Ives, and the excellent direction by Elia Kazan have contributed to the effect of a play which might otherwise have been thin, dull or incredible.

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