Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Director: Dr. Dorothea Handron
Audition Dates:
- Friday, Mar. 14, 2025 @ 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, Mar. 15, 2025 @ 10 a.m.
- Sunday, Mar. 16, 2025 @ 2:00 p.m.
Performance Dates:
- Thursday, June 5, 2025 @ 7:30 p.m.
- Friday, June 6, 2025 @ 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, June 7, 2025 @ @ 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
- Sunday, June 8, 2025 @ 2 p.m.
- Thursday, June 12, 2025 @ 7:30 p.m.
- Friday, June 13, 2025 @ 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, June 14, 2025 @ 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.
Characters: Non-traditional Casting
Maggie: Maggie’s loneliness and Brick’s refusal to show her his desire, has made her hard, nervous, and irritable. A woman constantly posing in the mirror, Maggie is a woman desperate in her sense of loneliness, who is made all the more beautiful in her envy, longing, and dispossession.
Brick: The favorite son and mourned lover. Brick embodies an almost archetypal masculinity. At the same time, the Brick before us is also an obviously broken man because of his repressed homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper.
Big Daddy: Brick’s father. Affectionately dubbed by Maggie as an old-fashioned “Mississippi redneck,” Daddy is a loud, brash, and vulgar plantation millionaire. Though his coming death has been quickly repressed, in some sense Daddy has confronted its possibility and tries to force his son to face his own desires.
Big Mama: Brick’s mother. A bit overweight, breathless, sincere, earnest, crude, and bedecked in flashy gems, Mama is a woman embarrassingly dedicated to a man who despises her and in feeble denial of her husband’s disgust. She considers Brick her “only son.”
Mae: A mean, agitated “monster of fertility” who schemes with her husband Gooper to secure Big Daddy’s estate. Mae appears primarily responsible for the “over-showing” of familial love and devotion that she and the children stage before the grandparents.
Gooper: A successful corporate lawyer. Gooper is Daddy’s elder and less-favored son. He deeply resents his parents’ love for Brick, viciously relishes in Daddy’s illness, and rather ruthlessly plots to secure control of the estate.
Reverend Tooker: A tactless, opportunistic, and hypocritical guest at Big Daddy’s birthday party. As Williams indicates, his role is to embody the lie of conventional morality.
Doctor Baugh: The sober Baugh is Daddy’s physician. He delivers Daddy’s diagnosis to Big Mama and leaves her with a prescription of morphine.
The Children: Mae and Gooper’s children. They appear here as grotesque, demonic “no- necked monsters” who intermittently interrupt the action on-stage. Under Mae’s direction, they offer up a burlesque image of familial love and devotion.
Synopsis
In Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the dysfunctional but wealthy Pollitt family gather to celebrate aging patriarch Big Daddy’s 65th birthday, but there is more to this gathering than a family reunion– Big Daddy, unbeknown to him, is dying of cancer. He is still to decide which of his sons will inherit the estate. His options include favorite son Brick, who drinks himself into oblivion in order to forget his desire for his friend Skipper and to try to bear the desires of his determined wife, Maggie. Or Big Daddy can choose his less-favored son Gooper, his fertile wife Mae, and their “no-neck monster” children. While sensuous Maggie “the cat” tries to work her wiles to secure a future for them, Brick spirals deeper into despair, crippled by both physical pain and emotional loss. As the hot summer evening unfolds the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge, and greed, lies, jealousy, and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach the boiling point. One of Williams’ most famous works and his personal favorite, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterful portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making.