Mendacity

(An excerpt from The Stylesmyths: Vintage Reportage on Broadway)

I don’t think it was a coincidence that as my sweet tabby cat Max slept curled up in the corner chair, my vintage Playbill for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof spilled across my home office desk — emerging from a black hole of bills, letters and papers piled high. These last few months, I made a mental note to select one play to write about from my collection. “Cat” is one of my earliest Playbills, dated 1956, and as the Fates would have it, a perfect choice for #PrideMonth.

A play about the idea of tolerance couldn’t be more in step with the times. This play, written at the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War, illustrates how America paid for her post-war affluence with a national anxiety fueled by the nuclear arms race and politically generated fear. We instigated a fever-pitch compulsion to maintain appearances of normalcy and conformity at all costs, regardless of the messy underbelly. Fast-forward and substitute ingredients of postmodern conservatism, partisanship, Roe v. Wade being overturned, continuous mass shootings, and conspiracy theories galore, and you bake a similar cake. History may not repeat, but it sure can rhyme.

Tennessee Williams’ play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, premiered at The Morosco Theatre on March 4, 1955. It was one of Williams’s best-known works and his personal favorite. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year and ran nearly 700 performances. A Southern Gothic morality tale that unfolds in the steaming Mississippi Delta, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof…