Left to right: Michael Catlin, Anne-Sophie Grenier, David Slack, Helen Bretzke, Garrett McCrea, Desmond Kerr, Katie Kerr, Annika Swackhammer, Beau Cassibo, Tessa Vaillancourt, Penny Nash, Kevin Shipley

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Damien Schaefer and Anne-Sophie Grenier

In a plantation house, the Pollitt family celebrates the 65th birthday of the family patriarch, Big Daddy. The mood is sombre, despite the festivities, because a number of evils poison the gaiety: greed, sins of the past and desperate hopes for the future spar with one another as the knowledge that Big Daddy is dying slowly makes the rounds.

Damien Schaefer and Michael Catlin

Younger son Brick's drinking is out of control, and has already led to his breaking his ankle while trying to jump hurdles at the high school athletic field where he was once star. His marriage to Maggie is in trouble, in part because of her affair with his childhood friend Skipper. But the real root of their problems, or at least of Brick's, may lie in the relationship between Brick and Skipper.

Swarming around Maggie and Brick are their intrusive, conniving relatives, all eager to see Maggie put in her place and Brick tumbled from his position of most-beloved son.

The original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theater on March 24, 1955, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in that year. London's West End production opened January 30, 1958. There have been many productions since including several Broadway and West End revivals.

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. He decided to become a playwright after seeing a production of Ibsen's Ghosts at the University of Missouri, but his plan had to wait when his father forced him to drop out of university.

Eventually returning to school, Williams had his first plays (Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind) produced in St. Louis.

His greatest success came in the 1940s and 1950s. The Glass Menagerie had a successful premiere in Chicago in 1944. The play moved to New York where it was a hit and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play of the Season. In 1947 he had another great success with A Streetcar Named Desire.

Between 1948 and 1959 seven more of his plays were performed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Garden District, and Sweet Bird of Youth. By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

He died in 1983 in New York.

We would like to acknowledge that this production takes place on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. We honour and give thanks to the land, its inhabitants and their enduring cultures.

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