“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at Westfield Community Players

When it was first produced in 1955, Tennesee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the winner of both Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Award as the best play of the season. The 1958 screen adaptation (starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman) was nominated for six academy awards, but was a watered-down version, glossing over several themes Williams originally explored: alcoholism, infidelity, sexual frustration, and homosexuality. The story centers on a Mississippi family divided by greed and favoritism, and their reaction when they learn the patriarch is dying of cancer. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterpiece of American theater, with vivid, funny and real characters exploring themes that are as relevent today as they were almost half a century ago.