Tennessee Williams might not be the biggest daddy in American theater — there is Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, August Wilson — but the Mississippi-born playwright comes awfully close. His early plays became a string of Broadway hits: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night of the Iguana, among them. Transferred to the movie screen, they left their mark on cinema, too, not least for providing indelible roles for indelible stars: Vivian Leigh, Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Burl Ives, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor.

For its Broadway debut, directed and nurtured by Elia Kazan, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featured Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara and Ives for its Broadway debut in 1955.  More famously, the 1958 movie starred Taylor and Newman as Maggie and husband Brick and Ives reprising his role as Big Daddy, a cotton plantation baron.

The second Williams’ work to win a Pulitzer Prize (after A Streetcar Named Desire) is the first of his plays Chris Coleman is producing and directing for the Denver Center stage. And, after the 2022 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it’s only the second classic by an American playwright, during his tenure. But says Coleman, “I know there’s an appetite with our audience for American classics.”

“People talk about Williams as a ‘poetic realist.’ I’m like, what does that mean?” says Coleman, artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company. “It sounds like he makes beautiful images — which he does — but I think what I discovered is the reason he has stuck around. Sometimes in these plays, he hits a truth about human existence. It just resonates like 18 layers beneath the surface in a way that feels really powerful.” Williams looms large.

Outsized, as well, is the South he hailed from and often depicted. As regions go, the South continues to compete with the West for the ways its truths and fables, its sins and hopes have shaped the American character. “I grew up in the South,” says Coleman, “and as a young director, I did not want to do Tennessee. I didn’t want to do Southern plays. Those stories, I’ve lived that. And they seemed corny to me. I wanted to do Shaw. And then, a few years ago, I did Streetcar.”

Chris Coleman, Artistic Director

Coleman, who was raised in Georgia and founded a theater in Atlanta, wasn’t surprised when actors toted some pretty peculiar baggage into the auditions. “What I’ve often found myself saying is, ‘You know, a tad of the dialect is all you need,’” he says, “because the tendency is to try to just play the dialect. I wanted people who could live inside these people.” Headlining the cast is local actor Noelia Antweiler as Maggie and Adam Hagenbuch (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) as Brick. Lawrence Hecht — who appeared with the Denver Center Theatre Company in productions including The Pillowman, Glengarry Glen Ross, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and served as head of the DCPA’s former National Theatre Conservatory and Head of Acting for adult classes — returns to the Denver Center to rail against mendacity as Big Daddy.

While the play is set on a Mississippi plantation, much of its hothouse drama unfolds in the bedroom of Maggie and Brick, the once idolized gridiron QB who now throws back whiskeys. Maggie and Brick, his brother, Gooper and wife Mae have come to join Big Mama for a birthday celebration after the big man clears a cancer scare. Only it wasn’t a scare. At the start of the play, the couples already know the bad news. A doctor and a minister — longtime family friends — are also on hand to break the news to Big Mama.

Coleman recalls his reaction upon rereading the play.  “I’m like, holy cow, this is potent —characters are so delicious — and the center of it being a fight over the estate, but also a fight for survival.” At the heart of that throwdown? Maggie.

“I had always thought Maggie’s ultimate goal was to get Brick back because she was in love with him. And she is in love with him. But I think Maggie has to secure her financial future at any costs.” — Chris Coleman, Director

“I think a lot of people now cast Maggie as close to Elizabeth Taylor as they can get, which is off sometimes — really pretty but can’t act it right. What’s tricky about playing that role is you’ve got to fight,” he says. “If she’s too blunt, she’ll feel harsh. And she’s got to try to charm Brick. She’s got to try to charm the audience through her humor and storytelling so that we want her to win. So that we’re on her side in the fight.”

Returning to classics offers theater-makers — but also audiences— fresh angles on the play’s truths. For years, one way into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof focused on the tense dance between Maggie and Brick. It hinged on the fractured love story between a woman who wants and a husband who, since the death of his best friend and football buddy, has been dousing all feeling with liquor. An undercurrent of thwarted desire (hers) and repressed possibly queer sexuality (his) roils the goings on.

So, what happens then when we see Big Daddy — “hilarious and raunchy, so tender and so committed to his son,” as Coleman notes — anew? When for the first time, we hear the sympathy in the towering patriarch’s approach to his favorite son?

While it was played down in the movie adaptation, the meaning of Brick and Skipper’s love for each other hangs over Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “I don’t know if he was a gay man,” says Coleman about Brick. “Williams thought he was a gay man, who is so burdened by his shame and his cowardice toward probably the love of his life that he is basically slowly killing himself.”

Brick tells Maggie he drinks to hear a click. “The click I get in my head when I’ve had enough of this stuff to make me peaceful.” What happens when we listen to Williams awaiting our own click — not of peace but of fresh understanding?

In returning to Williams, Coleman remains struck by the playwright’s humor. And Cat is peppered with bitingly amusing moments, starting perhaps with Maggie’s candid riff about Gooper and Mae’s many children, whom she calls “little no neck monsters.” Maggie and Brick have yet to give Big Daddy and Big Mama grandkids, and it is a source of concern.

“Williams is funny,” Coleman says. “And then he rips your heart out.”

DETAILS
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Oct 3-Nov 2, 2025 • Kilstrom Theatre
Tickets