Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
CLASSIC DRAMA
Forty years after Keir Dullea played the handsome hobbling Brick in the acclaimed 1974 Broadway revival of Cat, he played Big Daddy at Provincetown's Town Hall. Also starred Mia Dillon (Tony nominee for Crimes of the Heart) as Big Mama.
directed by Elizabeth Falk
starring Keir Dullea And Mia Dillon
WELLFLEET HARBOR ACTORS THEATER
Wellfleet, MA
“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? —I wish I knew...
Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...”
About The Play
This Pulitzer Prize-winning gem is an emotionally intense drama that sizzles with passion and greed. In the course of one steamy evening, a prominent Southern dynasty is pushed to the brink when tender memories are relived and life-altering secrets are revealed.
It’s the 65th birthday of wealthy Southern plantation owner Big Daddy and his family has gathered to celebrate, while sparing him the news that he’s dying. As son Brick, a hunky former football hero, mysteriously retreats from his desirable but sexually frustrated wife Maggie, Brick’s money-hungry brother and sister-in-law plot to secure more than their share of the family fortune.
This was the first time Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater ever produced a Tennessee Williams classic, giving it the unique perspective of Elizabeth Falk, the first woman to direct at the London’s Globe Theater.
About The Creative Team
Keir Dullea (Big Daddy) has been a professional actor for 55 years and is thrilled to revisit this play in which he played Brick in the legendary 1974 Broadway revival with Elizabeth Ashley. His other Broadway credits are: Dr. Cook's Garden, Butterflies Are Free, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, and Doubles. Additional stage appearances include London's West End and numerous appearances off and off off Broadway and in regional theatres across the country, the most recent being at the Guthrie Theatre in Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood. He has starred in 26 feature films which include "David and Lisa" (Golden Globe), "2001 A Space Odyssey" as Comdr. Bowman,"Mme. X" with Lana Turner,"Bunny Lake Is Missing" opposite Lawrence Oliver, and Robert De Niro's"The Good Shepherd" playing Angelina Jolie's father. He has appeared in 63 TV films and guest star rolls from "Naked City" to "Damages". He will seen in the soon to be released "Isn't It Delicious".
Mia Dillon (Big Mama) is a Tony Award Nominated actress for her portrayal of Babe in Crimes of the Heart. Other Broadway credits include Our Town with Paul Newman, Hay Fever, Once a Catholic (Drama Desk Nomination), The Corn is Green. The Miser, Agnes of God, and Da. She has been seen off Broadway many times in plays such as The Exonerated, The Three Sisters (Manhattan Theatre Club), Come Back Little Sheba (Roundabout Theatre), and regionally at Yale Rep, Cleveland Playhouse, Westport Country Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse,the Alley Theatre, the McCarter and The Berkshire Theatre Festival. Film and TV includes Gods and Generals, The Money Pit, Fine Things, All Good Things, Mary and Rhoda, The Cosby Show, the soon to be released Isn’t It Delicious, and all 3 Law & Orders. She can regularly be heard reading short stories on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
Steven DeMarco (Brick) has appeared regionally in Troilus and Cressida (Aeneas/Menelaus) with Actor's Shakespeare Project, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer's Night Dream with Shakespeare Now!, Superior Donuts (Kiril Ivakiv) at the Lyric Stage Company, The Donkey Show (Doorman) at the American Repertory Theater, Mrs. Smith Presents (Fire Marshal Dan) at the 2010 "Emerging America Festival", BUG (Jerry Goss) with Flat Earth Theater among others. His film and television credits include a guest starring role on Body of Proof (ABC), co-starring on the pilot Gilded Lilly's (ABC), the film Perkins 28 (Fabular Films), and a national commercial campaign for Dunkin' Donuts (Hill Holiday Connors). He is a graduate of the Harvard University Extension School where his field of study was in the Dramatic Arts.
Madeline Lambert (Maggie) recently played Anne Boleyn in the U.S. Premiere of Anne Boleyn at The Gamm Theatre. Other credits include Steel Magnolias and A Christmas Carol at Trinity Repertory Company; Middletown and At The Vanishing Point at Manbites Dog Theater Company, O'Neil National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Horizons, LAByrinth Theatre Company, Chicago Dramatists, M.F.A. in Acting from Brown Univeristy/Trinity Rep. B.A. in Theater Studies and English from Duke University. Graduate of and Teaching Associate at The School of Steppenwolf. Madeleine records audiobooks for AudioGO and Tantor Audio.
Elizabeth Falk (Director) has directed 64 productions of drama, musical theatre and opera at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Off-Broadway, in Russia, Korea, Austria, 7 states and Shakespeare’s Globe London, the first woman ever to direct there. When an actress, Elizabeth played 5 of Tennessee’s women: Laura (Glass Menagerie), Catherine (Suddenly Last Summer), Hannah (The Night of the Iguana), Alma (Summer & Smoke) and Maggie. Thrilled to be making her Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival debut. She spent 40 summers in Truro with husband, writer Lee Falk (d.1999). Married to conductor/wind virtuoso Martin Piecuch, they live in New York and Stonington, CT and on their sailing sloop Maestro. “Cat” is their tenth theatrical collaboration.
Williams On Cat
First published in the New York Herald Tribune April 17, 1955. The essay is a direct response to two of Walter Kerr’s reviews for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the New York Herald Tribune (March 25 and April 3). This appears in "Where I Live" essays by TW, published by New Directions Press:
But ambiguity is sometimes deliberate, and for artistically defensible reasons, I can best answer Mr. Kerr’s objection [to not assigning Brick as straight or gay] by a quote from the manuscript of the play which is not yet available to readers, but will be in a few weeks. It is a long note that occurs in the second act, at the point where Big Daddy alludes to the charge of abnormality in Brick’s relation to his dead friend, Skipper:
Brick’s resolute detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they’re discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick’s side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper and Brick would rather die than live with. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to “keep face” in the world they lived in, a world of popular heroes, may be at the heart of the “mendacity” that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or it may be only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important.
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.