the critics are out to get me. You’ll see how vicious they are. <strong>The</strong>y make comparisons with my earlier work, but I’m writing different-ly now”. Williams to the end was concerned with “the depths and origin of human feelings and motiva-tions, the difference being that he had gone into a deeper, more obscure realm”. Williams died, Febru-ary 25, 1983 having choked on a bottle cap. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is was one of Williams’s best-known works and his personal favorite which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. <strong>The</strong> play features several recurring motifs, such as social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity, decay, sexual desire, repression, and death. It play was adapted as a motion picture of the same name in 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick, with Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood recreating their stage roles. Mendacity, is a recurring theme throughout. One can see the parallel between Williams’ life and the characters actions in the play. Observe how Big Daddy uses the word to express his disgust with the “lies and liars” he sees around him, and with complicated rules of social conduct in Southern society and culture. <strong>The</strong> two primary objects of repression are Brick’s homosexual desires and Daddy’s imminent death, creating mirror images of each other….and a reflection of Williams. With the exception of Brick, a broken man, the entire family lies to Big Daddy and Big Mama about his terminal cancer. Further-more, Big Daddy lies to his wife, and oldest son, Gooper and his Mae, who exhibit avaricious motives, in their attempt to secure Big Daddy’s estate after his death. A recurring phrase is the line, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?”. <strong>The</strong> other powerful focus in the play is the ways in which humans deal with death as are the futility and nihilism, which argues the skeptical view that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic values, encountered when when one is confronted with imminent mortality. <strong>The</strong> cat, Maggie, a typically hysterical, and dissatisfied Williams heroine, refers to a particular fantasy of femininity and feminine desire. Maggie’s loneliness has made her a “cat,” hard, anxious, and bitter. <strong>The</strong> Williams’s genius lies in the force of the audience’s identification with this heroine, a woman desperate in her sense of lack, masochistically bound to man who does not want her, and made all the more beau-tiful in her envy, and longing, that she hides in childishness. Notice the many other symbolic objects in the play, to many to discuss in this short synopsis. <strong>The</strong> tele-phone calls and conversations, the memories of travel to Africa with its exotic savagery and sexual ex-cess, the bed that Brick and Maggie share their marriage lie, the large console that holds the TV, music and liquor, which Brick hides his feelings in his drunkenness, and phallic crutch. <strong>The</strong> great cast and director of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at May River <strong>The</strong>ater have captured this master-piece and the essence of the characters and underlying motifs and symbols as Williams intended them to be. It is a do not miss show, as when one leaves the theater, there are many questions about ones self and life that will be asked…… and some answered. May River <strong>The</strong>ater should be congratulated for presenting this great psychological drama. As we were going to press, we learned that our dear friend and Co-founder of May River <strong>The</strong>ater, Ed Dupuis passed away. Ed and his late wife Jodie have entertained thousands of those who follow Performing Arts and greatly influenced hundreds of aspiring actors, while they spread their love and generosity to all that knew them. <strong>The</strong>y are now reunited and dancing with angels while they sing together all of their favorite show tunes. <strong>The</strong>y will be missed but not forgotten as May River <strong>The</strong>ater is their lasting legacy to Bluffton. 42
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