Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Act One

In the sweeping mansion on Big Daddy Pollitt’s Mississippi cotton plantation, Maggie, the beautiful, sensuous wife of favorite son Brick Pollitt, is dressing at her mirror while Brick, who has been injured and uses a crutch, gets out of the shower. She is irritable, exhausted by the antics of her many nieces and nephews. She terms the children of Brick’s brother, Gooper, “no-neck monsters.” Maggie tells Brick that the performative skits Gooper and his wife, Mae, have been staging are a ploy to convince Big Daddy (who is dying of cancer-- a fact known to all but Big Daddy and Big Mama) to leave the bulk of the estate to them.

Brick, Maggie complains, is only helping his brother’s case by daily drinking himself into oblivion and treating her with disdain. Unlike Gooper and Mae, who have produced grandchildren and followed all of Big Daddy’s rules, the only things Maggie and Brick have going for them is Brick’s golden reputation with his father, and Big Daddy’s “lech” for