Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is Tennessee Williams's drama about the Pollitts, a rich Mississippi Delta family who gather at their plantation house for the patriarch's birthday and spend one evening dodging the truth about money, sex, illness and one another. Williams wrote it in three acts, in the Southern Gothic tradition, building it between 1953 and 1955 from his own 1952 short story "Three Players of a Summer Game."

The play reached Broadway in 1955 and won that year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama, one of two Williams received (the other was for A Streetcar Named Desire). Of all his plays, it was the one Williams liked best.

This page covers the new Broadway revival that Seaview announced on April 21, 2026, with Sam Gold directing. It is planned for spring 2027 as a strictly limited engagement. Broadway has revived the play five times before, most recently in 2013.

The action takes place over a single evening, much of it in the bedroom that Brick shares with his wife, Margaret, usually called Maggie. Big Daddy Pollitt, the largest cotton planter in the Delta, has just returned from the Ochsner Clinic believing his tests came back clean. Everyone except him and Big Mama knows he has terminal cancer; the news has been kept from them for the birthday.

Brick, once a football star, drinks steadily and keeps Maggie at arm's length. His drinking got worse after his friend Skipper, who is never seen, killed himself. Maggie, who grew up poor, is afraid that Brick's brother, Gooper, and Gooper's wife, Mae, who already have children, will end up with the estate while Brick won't fight for it. As the night goes on, Big Daddy and Maggie each press Brick on what his bond with Skipper really was.

Williams wrote much of the dialogue in eye dialect, spelling words as they sound to suggest Southern accents. The play's central subject is mendacity, the lying that runs through the family, alongside greed, desire and repression, alcoholism, homosexuality, loneliness and facing death.

At director Elia Kazan's urging, Williams rewrote the third act for the 1955 premiere, softening Maggie among other changes, and the edition New Directions published that year printed both third acts: the one he first wrote and the one Broadway saw. For the 1974 revival Williams revised all three acts, and that text, published in 1975, is the one most later revivals have followed. As of October 2026, the new production has not said which text it will use.

Gold has described the play as a story of people who lie and prey on each other's weak spots to get ahead, and he has said its theme of mendacity feels as pressing now as it did when Williams wrote it. Nobile has said Gold tends to pare classic texts down until they feel present-day, and that this time the director wants to dig into how a family falls apart.

Kazan's original production, presented by The Playwrights' Company, opened at the Morosco Theatre on March 24, 1955, and played 694 performances before closing on November 17, 1956. Barbara Bel Geddes was Maggie, Ben Gazzara was Brick, Burl Ives was Big Daddy and Mildred Dunnock was Big Mama. Jo Mielziner designed the set and lighting.

On Broadway, Maggie has since been played by Elizabeth Ashley in 1974, Kathleen Turner in 1990, Ashley Judd in 2003, Anika Noni Rose in 2008 and Scarlett Johansson in 2013. The 2008 revival, directed by Debbie Allen at the Broadhurst Theatre, had an all-Black cast, with James Earl Jones as Big Daddy and Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama.

MGM filmed the play in 1958, with Richard Brooks directing Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor; Burl Ives repeated his stage role as Big Daddy.