Word: cats
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...going to re main in prison. It would be very hard for me to leave again. But I assure you I am going to." Locked in a Lavatory. Alfie's vivid sense of injustice dates back to childhood, when his father died after ten strokes of the cat-o'-nine-tails for armed robbery. Lodged in a children's home, he made his first break at seven. He escaped a Borstal institution for delinquents in his teens, and during World War II learned the art of camouflage as an army deserter. His first headline break came after...
Eyes stare out of the darkness, so green and narrow they could have been admired by a lecherous khan. They move closer. A young black cat, just full grown, steps out of a bit of sewer pipe and starts to move through the city. Its gait is all leg and female, stealthy, preying. It walks across curbs and over the cracks in sidewalks. It hunts and bristles and pads along, looking. The eyes again. Another cat. Snarl. Fangs. Battle. A fierce toss of bodies, fearsome screeches, victory. The black cat moves on. All the while, words are appearing above, below...
Williams is an electrifying scenewright, because his people are the sort who make scenes, explosively and woundingly. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy jerks the crutch out from under his son Brick's arm and sends him sprawling in agony; a few minutes later Brick kicks the life out of Big Daddy by telling the old man that he is dying of cancer. In an age that suppresses its tantrums as impolite, part of Williams' cathartic appeal for an audience is to allow it to act out its hostilities vicariously. Above all, Williams...
...dynamic Williams-Kazan entente that would dominate Broadway for more than a decade. Ups and downs of critical approval never dampened the excitement of a Williams opening: 1948's Summer and Smoke, 1951's The Rose Tattoo, 1953's Camino Real, 1955's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957's Orpheus Descending, 1958's Garden District, 1959's Sweet Bird of Youth, and 1960's Period of Adjustment...
When Iguana opened in late December 1961, Williams proved to be in his best dramatic form since Streetcar, with the debatable exception of Cat. By echoing a strain of gentleness unheard since Menagerie, Iguana served to bracket the whole range of Williams' achievement, a body of work so substantial that it now casts a larger shadow than the man who made it. In that shadow lies a form of theater as well as a series of plays, the theater of Chekhovian sensibility mated with the Freudian irrational unconscious. The champion of the rival Ibsenite theater of social