The Cat has Nine Lives

Abstract

Beneath a hot roof, on an oppressive summer's day, in a roasting room, Brick and Margaret Pollitt face each other. Brick, heated and hardening in this oven-like bedroom, turns his thoughts toward the liquor cabinet. Margaret, wanting a child by her husband (“in the oven,” as father-in-law Big Daddy would say), and tense (as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof) because of enforced continence, turns her thoughts toward the bed.Indeed, the two most prominent scenic elements of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—elements which fulfill the needs both of the world on stage and the box office in the lobby—are a liquor cabinet and a bed. The former is a “monument,” and the latter is “slightly raked to make figures on it seen more easily….”