Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

From Delta Heat to Digital Haze: Mendacity’s Grip on American Life (An excerpt from The Stylesmyths: Vintage Reportage on Broadway)

In a time when truth and illusion are once again battling for control of the American mind, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels less like a relic and more like a warning.

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

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 its post-war affluence with a national anxiety fueled by the nuclear arms race and politically generated fear. We fomented 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, civil unrest, home-grown terrorism, suspicion, and conspiracy theories. Shake and stir with the zeal of conviction fueled by the media and blogosphere, and you pour a similarly potent cocktail.