Character Connection

Finding a soft spot for a flawed character in Tennessee Williams' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'

David Anthony Brinkley plays Big Daddy in the Guthrie Theater's production of Tennessee Williams' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'

Image credit: Michael Brosilow/Guthrie Theater

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By: Faith Christine

The Guthrie Theater’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been garnering lots of accolades and favorable media attention since launching in mid-January (including this review from METRO). Most of Drama Queen’s thespian friends have already seen it. Everybody was nattering on about how hot actor Peter Christian Hanson looked in a bath towel, what the real reason was behind why Maggie and Brick were not sleeping together – and just why Brick needed to keep drinking until he heard a click in his head.

DQ didn’t have much else to add to that conversation, so she was intrigued when she read in the playbill that Tennessee Williams called Cat his best work. It certainly wasn’t an opinion entirely shared by her friends. Furthermore, they had mixed feelings about the playwright’s assertion that the family patriarch, Big Daddy, was his best creation.

DQ could appreciate that Daddy was Williams’ proudest invention, however. He was also perhaps the best casting of this production. She thought Daddy had all the attributes of somebody she’d actually enjoy being with, sitting together in rockers admiring his plantation while sipping Kentucky bourbon. He was a man nearing the end of a life in which he had succeeded financially, but not with family relationships. He saw himself surrounded by mendacity, a word he most often used to describe his family. It was painfully clear to him how crazy and damaged they were.

His wife, Big Mama, had been driven to babbling on so much that she drove everybody around her crazy. His favorite son, Brick, a drunken ex-athlete, couldn’t get past the suicide of his best friend, Skipper. Meanwhile his scrumptiously seductive daughter-in-law, Maggie, was desperate to get their cut of the inheritance. And Daddy’s oldest, and appropriately named, son, Gooper, had grown up to become a slick lawyer with an extraordinarily fertile and devious wife.

Yet in spite of Big Daddy’s failures as a father and a husband, DQ couldn’t help but like him. He was smart, raw, and flawed, his most obvious fault being an inability to sugarcoat his words. He embodied the type of men in Williams experienced during his life. It wasn’t hard for DQ to see why he had such a soft spot for him.

+ Faith Christine (a.k.a. "the Drama Queen") blogs every week for METRO. See more of her work here.