Tennessee Williams has said that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his favorite of his finished works. Like Williams other works, the final product of Cat on a Hot Tin Roofcame about after several revisions, which Williams was initially opposed to but which made the play an iconic American classic. There are three published versions of the play, the last of which evolved out of the pride Williams felt in the honesty of Big Daddy’s character.
The character of Big Daddy has elements of two people: Williams’s own father, and an acquaintance he met more than a decade before he wroteCat. During 1942, Williams spent the summer in Macon, Georgia, where he met Jordan Massie, Sr. who went by the name Big Daddy, which was not an uncommon nickname in the south at this time. Williams derived the title of the play from Massie’s description of someone who was “as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof”.
Big Daddy was also based loosely on Williams’ father, Cornelius, even though Williams had not spoken to his father for a long period of time before he wrote Cat. In his writing there are parallels to his father and his strained relationship with him. The elder Williams relished poker and liquor and the “companionship of man in hotel rooms far more than the family at home”. Williams Sr. was not only a basis for Big Daddy in Cat, but also for the father character in Glass Menagerie.
In Cat, Big Daddy has elements of Williams’s father, but as a character seems more understanding of Brick than Williams’s father was of him. Williams’ father died at the age of 77 on March 27, 1955, three days after Cat on a Hot Tin Roofopened on Broadway. Williams went to the funeral even though he had not spoken to his father in many years.
Williams felt a sense of pride in the character of Big Daddy; he felt he reached a level of “crude eloquence” with the character that brought a high level of honesty to the representation of the human condition within the play. Big Daddy fulfills an imperative role in the action of the play and the arc of the other characters in the play. Without the influences of Williams’s father and other people in his life, Big Daddy might not exist in the raw and influential form that he does in Cat.
—Morgan McAslan
Morgan McAslan is the dramaturg for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is a senior in the BFA dramaturgy program at the University of Arizona.
As one of Tennessee Williams’s masterpieces, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play that documents the ugly side of human nature in an articulate and crude manner. It is also Arizona Repertory Theatre’s summer production and the first production of the 2008-2009 season. ART’s Artistic Director, and director of Cat, Brent Gibbs, has brought together a talented cast including two recent University graduates, two ART company members, several members of the Tucson theatre community, and four children. The play is perfectly cast with actors who bring something of themselves to the characters and the play.
In rehearsal, Gibbs encourages the actors to participate in a collaborative manner. The first two weeks were dedicated to blocking, the period in rehearsal when characters’ movements and physical actions are decided. While working on the second act of the play, Gibbs stopped rehearsal in the middle of blocking and said, “Everyone take a moment and read the stage direction on page 117.” There was complete silence in the rehearsal room as the actors read:
“The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s psychological problem. I’m trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from “pat” conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.”
After everyone in the room finished reading, Gibbs said, “Right there. Right there, Williams tells us exactly what he’s trying to do with this play. It is very rare to have that kind of resource directly from the text of a play.” This sort of stage direction is indeed very rare. Usually, a playwright will write an introduction or a note at the beginning of a play explaining their intentions, but this stage direction appears in the middle of the action.
During extreme emotional highs between characters, Williams felt the need to explain his purpose, in order to aid actors in truthfully depicting the characters in a naturalistic way. Williams mentions an illusive solution to a psychological problem in the play that he feels the actors should seek. The mystery of character mentioned in the stage direction is something the audience should experience based on the nuance of live performance. Williams uses the stage direction as a device to communicate to an actor that there should be no ambiguity in their portrayal of the characters because the play is written so that ambiguity and mystery is revealed to an audience through plot and story. In order for that to be communicated, the characters have to be fully developed and motivated human beings. Gibbs is sensitive to this, and in an effort to be true to Williams’s original vision, he gave this passage special attention in rehearsal, encouraging the actors to continue to make character decisions in order to discover the nuance and mystery Williams emphasized with such importance.
—Morgan McAslan
Morgan McAslan is the dramaturg for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is a senior in the BFA dramaturgy program at the University of Arizona.
This past March, I was cast in an unusual comedy entitled Summertimeby Charles L. Mee. With SummertimeI found a play that is exceptionally different from any of the forms that we are so used to seeing in the theatre. A play that is once wholly modern and realistic, and yet a piece that reads as a classic set inside of a dream. This heartbreakingly funny play is so direct in its topic and at the same time it is very complex in its delivery and meaning.
Charles L. Mee is known for being the driving force behind the (re)making project. The (re)making project is a collection of plays written, adapted, copied, or stolen by Mee himself. He offers these plays online as a resource to the theatre world for performance, adaptation, rewriting or whatever a director and a group of actors would like to do with the pieces. And all of his writings are available for no charge. According to Mr. Mee “there is no such thing as an original play.”
Summertimeis about love, that is it. Love in all its forms: love between men and women, men and men, women and women, husbands and wives, husbands and lovers, wives and lovers, parents and children, between friends, acquaintances, and strangers. [Read more →]
(Hope Cladwell [Stefanie Brown] is held hostage by Bobby Strong [Kyle Harris] and Little Sally [Richelle Meiss]. Photo by Chris Richards.)
‘It begins with bodies’, I wrote at the top of my notes as I watched last-night’s run-through of Urinetown. One hardly expects a show riddled with musical-comedy to begin with the poor of Urinetown scattered about the stage. A man whose name is less-than-inconspicuously mentioned during the performance was similarly struck by the plight of the poor: Thomas Robert Malthus. [Read more →]
Associate Professor Richard T. Hanson has been a fixture at the University of Arizona for more than twenty-five years. He received his Master of Fine Arts from UA’s School of Theatre arts in 1981 and has been a member of its faculty since 1982. During his tenure at UA, he has directed and choreographed almost two dozen mainstage shows for the Arizona Repertory Theatre (ART) and is the founder and director of ENCORE, a musical revue touring group made up of the freshman musical theatre majors. Now the head of the Acting/Musical Theatre Division, he has the honor of having a UA Foundation Musical Theatre Endowment created in his name. This production of Urinetown marks the end of the Hanson era; Dick will be retiring from academia at the end of the Spring 2008 semester, and will continue to pursue his creative endeavors beyond the University setting with UA’s gratitude for his more than two decades of excellent service.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dick to discuss this production of Urinetown and what it means to him, both as a show in itself and as his sendoff production with ART.
“It’s really my kind of show,” he said. “I like those kind of raw rock-and-roll shows. It’s really contemporary, really modern, but yet it’s old-fashioned at the same time.”
We thought you might be interested in the seven minute video we created about our production of Titus Andronicus:
“In the end, it’s director Brent Gibbs who displays the greatest creativity, without coming between us and Shakespeare. He keeps the action on a human scale rather than resorting to monumental camp, makes good use of overhead projection of stage directions…and frames the play with a disturbing image.”—James Reel for the Tucson Weekly, 13 March 2008 (To read full review, click here.)
As part of the Theatre Studies BFA program, dramaturg Morgan McAslan sat down with director Brent Gibbs to discuss the themes and challenges of producing one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.
—Morgan McAslan
Morgan McAslan, Assistant Dramaturg for Titus Andronicus, is a senior in the BFA Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies program at UA.
Americans are addicted to violent images. From video games that plaster death by car crash across the screen, to media coverage of brutal events, violence permeates our everyday lives. But what happens when bloody acts appear on
stage? For example, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Macbeth stage multiple murders while in the popular musical West Side Story, gang members dance through fights and eventually deaths. These moments of stage violence haunts us long after we leave the theatre.
Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowmanpushes the audience’s comfort zone despite our previous encounters with theatre’s vindictive stories. Like filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction, McDonagh’s dark characters express psychological depth ultimately leaving audiences sympathizing with the most immoral people. Just as Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill seeks revenge against the slaying of her husband and supposed murder of her unborn child, the characters in The Pillowman seek retribution to the point where the audience is unsure of who to root for. However, instead of sitting in the cozy seats of a movie theatre, the blood and gore is staged a mere ten feet before us.
Director Jordan Parsons takes advantage of an intimate setting, by fully engaging our emotions through sight and sound. Parsons states:
“…the biggest problem was taking college actors and having them recreate a realistic portrayal of violence against children on stage…In an age where CSI and Tarantino manipulate our society, audiences feel the need to take it a step up on stage”.
Parsons does not feel as if the blood should detract audiences but remind them that it is the duty of the actors to tell a story.
McDonagh takes our emotions on a roller coaster ride of beautifully told soliloquies where the innocent and the guilty are felt for. In that respect McDonagh differs from Tarantino, by replacing fast action with heart-wrenching drama. In two and a half hours, the audience’s emotions go from sadness to laughter again and again. Parsons direction of McDonagh’s
play allows us to reflect on these sensations while creating a Tarantino-esque show to fit our contemporary thirst for entertainment and our endless attachment to the innocent.
—Alex Gendreau
Alex Gendreau is the assistant dramaturg for The Pillowman and is a sophomore in the BFA Dramaturgy & Theatre Studies program at the University of Arizona.
“Terras Astraea Reliquit” is a Latin quote in the text of Titus Andronicus (IV.3.4) which means, “the goddess of justice has left the Earth”. Jarrett Krauss, the sound designer of the production, felt that this phrase appropriately represents the duality between justice and revenge in the piece. Dramaturg Morgan McAslan sat down with BFA Theatre Design student Jarrett Krauss about his designs and compositions for Arizona Repertory Theatre’s Spring 2008 production of Titus Andronicus. The following is an interview with Mr. Krauss and two examples of his compositions for Titus.
JK: Really dark emotional sounds. Sounds you typically won’t hear in other plays. I made a list of adjectives like: foreboding, tense, dissonant, violent, abrasive, dark, ominous. It’s not so musical as an arrangement of sounds and simple melodies, which together leads itself to each force in the play. [Read more →]
At the first rehearsal of the Arizona Repertory Theatre’s production of Titus Andronicus, the director, Brent Gibbs, addressed the actors and designers and said, “we are doing Rome without columns.” ART’s production of Tituswill show its audience a side of Rome that is foreign to Americans, lacking the notion of clean, epic temples and columns. Similar to Shakespeare’s audience, our American audience has preconceived notions of how the Roman Empire should be represented.
Every American has a picture in their head of what Rome was, dictated by our education and our popular culture. From Ben Hur and Spartacus to Gladiator; there is a notion of gigantic, white, pristine buildings with columns, an all powerful and mighty hegemony, and heroic citizens. Rome was an Empire beyond comparison, that lasted three thousand years and controlled half of the world. It was amazing, but also self destructive. At the end of the Empire, barbarization of the army and a thirst for violence and death led the Romans to savage entertainments. These included bidding on the carcasses of gladiators and subsequently partaking in cannibalism. This degradation and self-destructive nature is a Rome that society doesn’t teach, but nevertheless existed. Using Shakespeare’s text, Gibbs is directing a production of Titus that brings out the uglier side of the Roman Empire.
Like Americans, Elizabethans learned about the Roman Empire in school. Education was a new obsession for the English. Shakespeare’s parents were most likely illiterate, and it is assumed that his father forced him to take advantage of a free education, because he did not have the opportunity as a child. It is unknown how long Shakespeare sustained his studies, but in school children studied Latin by reading Roman drama and poetry. In the play, Demetrius reads a scroll that quotes Horace in Latin and Chiron answers in reference to their grammar lessons, saying;
“O, ’tis a verse in Horace; I know it well./ I read it in the grammar long ago.” (IV.2.20-23)
This line refers more to the Elizabethan’s education and knowledge of Horace, rather than the Goths in Ancient Rome. As a society, Elizabethan England most likely identified themselves with the Romans: advanced, civilized and powerful. This is the context in which Shakespeare wrote Titus.
Titus is set in Rome, but not at a specific date, taking details from different periods in the Empire. ART’s production of Titus has centered a lot of research on the fall of the Roman Empire to inspire the design. The set of ART’s production represents a Rome that is no longer great and triumphant, but failing, and decomposing into a barbarous, murderous society. The design elements of ART’s production have made very specific choices to cater to the subversion of the common notion of what Rome as an Empire embodied; which reflects the themes that Shakespeare deals with in the action of the play. It proves to be a challenge, but ART’s production of Titus Andronicus promises to reward its audience with a provocative interpretation of Shakespeare’s Rome.
—Morgan McAslan
Morgan McAslan is the assistant dramaturg for Titus Andronicus and is a senior in the BFA dramaturgy program at the University of Arizona.
It was not easy for Anne Sullivan growing up. Her battle with trachoma at age seven had left her nearly completely blind. When she was ten years old, she was sent with her younger brother Jimmie to Tewksbury almshouse. Their mother had passed away recently and their father had abandoned them. Jimmie would pass away in the almshouse after a mere three months. The conditions at the almshouse were so horrible that the Board of State Charities in Massachusetts conducted an official investigation after hearing rumors or cruelty, rape and cannibalism. Anne Sullivan approached Samuel Gridley Howe, who was one of the founders of the Perkins School for the Blind, and Frank B. Sanborn of the Board and exclaimed: “Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Sanborn, I want to go to school!”
Had young Anne Sullivan not pulled the courage from inside herself to talk to Mr. Sanborn then little Helen Keller may never have learned to communicate. Anne Sullivan (Macy) (1866-1936) helped bring communication to a world that was once thought of as cut off. As the teacher of Helen Keller, Anne was later named a “Miracle Worker” by Samuel L. Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain. The nickname that the father of American literature would give Anne became the title for William Gibson’s Tony-Award winning play, currently in rehearsals by theArizona Repertory Theatre.
On the second day of rehearsal, the cast and crew of the ART production were invited on a field trip to the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind (ASDB) at the Tucson Campus School, located a few miles from the University of Arizona. The actors and production staff jumped at the chance to observe and learn about the teachers and students at the ASDB. At the school, we met Kathy Zwald, a supervising teacher for the blind department of the ASDB high school. Kathy’s extensive credentials include two Master’s degrees as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Education Orientation and Mobility, which consists of over 600 hours in blindfold training. Kathy explained to us that the school had been around since 1890, and currently consists of three different schools: an elementary, middle and a high school. The facilities at the school include a track and field, a gymnasium with a rock climbing wall, library, cafeteria, a swimming pool and proscenium theatre. Achievements of the school’s various sports trophies are displayed proudly in the gymnasium.
When Anne Sullivan entered the Perkins Institute for the Blind on October 7, 1880, it was a still a relatively new school. Life at the school was harsh for Anne. She had grown up around other Irish Catholics and now found herself surrounded by well-to-do Protestants. The fourteen-year-old visually impaired Anne did not know how to read, write or do arithmetic when she entered the Perkins School, but this only strengthened her resolve to learn. The students and teachers did not know how to respond to a student whose education had been neglected for so many years. They ridiculed and teased Anne, and once after a heavy argument with a teacher, she was locked in the closet with a skeleton that was used for anatomy lessons. Anne shook the bones of the skeleton so hard that her teacher promptly released her for fear that she would destroy the class learning tool. After viewing the gymnasium at the ASDB, the field trip participants were divided up to observe different classes in the high school. Ken Ball teaches U.S. History, World History, Government and Economics at the Tucson campus. With modern-day technological advances, he is able to help the students learn using a variety of methods, one of which is a Braille embosser. With the help of a program called Duxbury, Microsoft Word documents can be translated to Braille. The Braille embosser prints out paper, as well as sticker transparencies to put over posters and charts for the students. Another learning device provided by the school is a Braille computer. This small portable computer is available for use for all students who need it at the school. It is equipped with a flash card and USB ports as well as wi-fi capability.
Computers and history are not the only subjects studied at the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind. In Deb Harts’s English class, the children are put to the test with their reading skills. Her walls are adorned with Braille editions of classics such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and As You Like It, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities. Other books include James and the Giant Peach, The Odyssey of Homer, Heidi, Little Women, Black Beauty, and Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising to name a few. Hundreds of titles are available to read at the Tucson campus. In 1886, the year that Anne Sullivan graduated from the Perkins School, there were a mere 61 book titles available to read in Braille.
After the ART cast and crew had visited the school, they all left with a different outlook. Many were surprised that the students at ASDB were so similar to themselves. When Richelle Meiss, who is portraying Anne Sullivan inThe Miracle Worker, was asked about her experience at the ASDB, she replied:
“When visualizing the Perkins School for the Blind where Anne Sullivan attended, I thought I had a clear picture of the daily life of a blind student. However, when I visited the School for the Deaf and Blind in Tucson, I was surprised how different it was from what I imagined. It’s something a person has to experience to understand the atmosphere. I found that there was a definite sense of purpose and community at the school we visited.
“One blind child I witnessed made a profound impact on me. Her name was Sarah, and she was a new student to the school. She had an eagerness to learn, her fingers flying over the Braille of the pages of Maniac McGee, and a slight smile that never left her face. Anne and Helen often talked of having a light that shown out to the world. This student, it struck me, had just this light. There was a determination and vitality in Sarah that reminded me of the personalities of Helen and Anne.”
The teachers at the ASDB are helping many of these students enter universities and colleges as well as teaching the students life skills to survive in what could be a potentially harsh environment. These are the same life skills that young Anne Sullivan brought to Helen Keller. To quote Anne Sullivan at her commencement speech from the Perkins School where she graduated class valedictorian in 1886:
“All the wondrous physical, intellectual and moral endowments, with which man is blessed, will, by inevitable law, become useless, unless he uses and improves them.”
The trip to the ASDB was an enlightening and thought-provoking experience for the ART students involved. Teaching the deaf and blind can be a daunting yet rewarding task. It takes perseverance, skill, love and dedication, all the traits one might expect to find in a miracle worker.
Every American has a picture in their head of what Rome was, dictated by our education and our popular culture. From 
