TRUTH AND LIES.
The two versiona of Tennessee Williams' CAT
ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Maurice Rowdon,
Via delle Alp1 Apuane 15,
Monte Sacro,
Rome, ITALY.


THE TWO VERSIONS OF 1 CAT ON' A HOT TIN ROOF' BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS.
The scene is the Missipsipi Delta,
the quiet, mellow
house of the richest cotton planter there. The mellowness
of this house is felt throughout the play : it is perfectly
conveyed by the image of sunlight pouring through shutters
in the late afternoon. The author insists that it be there,
a deliberate part of the design, so' that even the 'dread of
death' should be 'gently touched and soothed by it'. The
house and the plantation outside are the element of eternity
in the play a - the silence which devours all the quarrels,
lies and poisonous thoughts', and renders them null.
Big Daddy, the cotton glanter, has cancer and_will. not
live long. He has a son named Brick, married to a robust,
handsome young woman called Margaret. They are childless.
The play centres largely on the relation between Big Daddy
and Brick. Big Daddy 1 - a violent, plain-speaking, despotic
man. - a is closer to Brick than to anyone else in
the family,
though Brick says little these days and is an alcoholic.
Big Daddy's personality is strikingly presented the moment
he walks on the stage: a birthday party has been arranged for
him a - the clérgyman and the local doctor are there - and his
Brick
first word when they tellshim 'Congratulations!" is -- Crap...'
He has had enough of humbug. He has elept with his wife
mechanically for several decades, yet he can't bear her smell,
her voice, the sight of her body 1 - so he tells his son in
their great dialogue together. It seems that the play takes
place during those first moment B of real honesty in the family:


it is the painful revelation of a lifetime of lies.
There are several obvious lies in the play, all of which
are felt most strongly by Big Daddy and his favourite son,
Brick. There is the lie that issues from the good, warm
body of Big Mamma : that everything is all right and that
Daddy is only saying. - Crap' to everything because he is in
a bad state of nerves. There is the lie that Bid Daddy's
other son, Gooper, and hiewife. really love him as much as they
profess: they have come with their five monstrous children
('no-necks', Brick's wife calls them) to be in at thè death,
8o to speak, and to get the management of the cotton plantation;
in fact, Big Daddy detests both them ànd their ohiidren. There
is the lie that Bid Daddy's examination at the clinic showed
a negative result and that he only has a 'spastic colon' after
all, not cancer. There is the lie in Brick's life a - that he
has taken to drink because his athlete days are over (he was
a celebrated athlete), while in fact it is. because his best
friend Skipper committed suloide after declaring a homosexual
attachment to him which he rejeoted absolutely
There is the
lie in Briok's marriage - he no longer sleeps with Margaret,
apparently because he no longer finds her attraotive, but in
fact, as she points out, because the memory of Skipper is
haunting him and turning him against her, the wife who.
interfered in their relation. And finally there is the lie :
but less obvious than the others - - that Brick feels great
horror first at the mention of Skipper's name, and. secondly
at the imputation that he has had a 'dirty', that is to. say 9
homosexual, relation with him.
Neither he nor the other"
characters explode this lie. And here is perhaps the chief


weakness of the play
that a lie lurks there unexamined by
'the author.
We pay a lot of attention to Brick. He is a golden boy -
in the twilight of his youth, and the effects of alcohol are
not yet visible on him. He is silent, melancholy and shrewd.
As a character he is the integrity and inwardness of the play e
He will not sell himself to lies - a except one, that about
Skipper, which is too painful to face. Yet the exact nature
of that pain is not clear to us: is it due to the fact that
he feils he has killed the young man? is it because of that
'dirty' imputation - a the message he reads in other people's
eyes? is it because he is in faot a homosexual and will not -
cannot out of compassion for hisWife, perhaps a face it?
Whatever the answer, his horror about the whole thing seems to
be exaggerated a and the exaggeration explaine one of the
dramatic failures of the play, that in the dialogue between
him and his wife (Act One) when she is talking to him very
straight about his feelings for Skipper and he
outraged and
saying nothing = - keeps aiming at her with his
The
crutch..
failure is helped by the fact that the crutch itself is of
false dramatic importance: it does not indicate to us, 'This
man is a'oripple from life', it cannot be regardad as a mark
of destiny, like Oedipus' eyes streaming with blood, because
it is the result of a tumble he has had the night before trying
a hurdle when drunk : a broken ankle. It can only arouse
sentimental pity. But this would not be a serious ortioism
if Brick's feelings were convincing, if we could feel with him
first his horror that Hargaret should bring Skipper into the
conversation at all and secondly his horror that she should


defile his friendship with worde a a 'name it dirty' - a which
in any case she does not do since she says at the outset, 'It
was one of those beautiful, ideal things they tell about in
Greek legends, it wouldn't be anything else, you being you...
If'he had merely felt guilty at the thought of having driven
his best friend to suicide everything would have been clear
and the drama would have looked after itself. But because
we cannot see exactly where Brick's horror lies we cannot feel
with him while he is hitting out at Margaret a a though we are
expected to do so eince he does not speak.
The fact 1s that nowadays, when homosexuality 1s, of not
more praoté siea, at least more disoussed than at any previous
time in Christendom, few of us feel hovror at the mere mention
of the term. All right
let us say that Gooper and his
wife (from whom the imputation mostly comes), perhaps Big
Mamma also, would simulate horror, even feel it, being on the
side, 8o to speak, of social humbug. But Big Daddy has had
enough of lies. And when he disousses Skipper with Brick in
the second act he shows very clearly that he has no inhibitions
on the subject at all.
In fact, he says, 'I knocked aound in
my time' and 'I seen all things and understood a lot of them'.
Agreed that Brick himself may feel very sensitive about the
imputation, especially as he has been an athlete working with
people who despise 'ducking sissies' and 'queers' (as he himself
calls them in an outburst of indignation), but this sense of
outrage does not tally with the reet of his nature, which is
withdrawn, quiet and wryly aware of the fact that all righteous
attatudes taken up by people have a questionable origin.
We feel he would merely shrug the thing off, as he shrugs off
Gabparks


Gooper's greed and the unpleasant reference of Gooper's wife
to the fact that he and Margaret no longer slèep together
(both Gooper and his wife are righteous people). The author
tells us him self that Briok has that charming 'cool air of
detachment that people have who have given up the struggle'.
There is a kind of heroio resignation about him which Big Daddy
clearly admires even while it worries hime And this exaggerated
horror over the use of a name
'You think me and Skipper did,
did, did! - - sodony : a together?' - - 1s not heroic, much less
resigned. It would be heroic 1f 1t were his central conflict
in the play, if he were terrified for his personal reputation,
but this is clearly not the case: he does not seem, to care very
much about his reputation, now that his heyday is over. His
horror is that induced by humbug
the very humbug he pitches
himself agaihst.
The real hopror of homosexuality
that in the end it is a solitary act - is not touched upon.
We are only presented with the social horror : that it is
something practised by people whom Gooper would consider
outsiders. It is not treated square-on as a living problem,
a source of pain and A TDIE guilt, which the theme suggests
it should have been.
Had Brick been a homosexual and afraid to confess it; had
he killed his friend in cowardice, by failing to admit that he
shared his feelings; had he resolved to go on living with his
wife and crush his other desires, or to abandon her while still
feeling a certain love and compassion for her : this would have
been a real dramatic confliat. It would have made the play a:
tragedy, in place of a stirring spectacle of family passions, of


the will to truth against the will to humbug.
But even this contrast between truth and humbug (B1g Daddy,
Brick and Margaret versus Gooper and his wife, with Big Mamma
in her goodness trying to make peace between them) is lost
thrown away rather - in the Broadway version of thé third act.
And here, 1t seems to me, is the second exampls of the author's
subservience, quite unwitting-y, to social instead of real
values - - his subservience to the question, 'What will people
think?' instead of 'What do they feel?'
This act (in both versions) centres round a family meeting
organised by Gooper and Mae to tell Big Mamma that her husband
has cancer after all, not a spastic colon, as she still thinks.
But Gooper's real object is to get a plan before her concerning
the disposal of the huge estate, which he has dfawn up in the
anstker
presence of a lavyer.
She will hear none of thie. She is
distraught and obstinately unbelieving at the same time. Only
Brick's presence 18 a consolation to her, and in a sudden access
of love she tells him that if he could give Margaret a child it
would be Big Daddy's 'dream come true'. Like Big Daddy, she
bad turned againet Gooper and Mae. For they have no reverence
and no real awareness of other people. Even before death they
have no reverence. They see nothing beyond their own interests
and the Bocial form. of a thing.
In the first (unperformed) version of this act we see
Gooper and Mae 'preparing' her for the shock of the truth.
: They nudge and poke and make faces at each other. When Gooper
is about to speak his wife stops him and hides his words in a
burlesque fashion with 'A breeze! A breeze!'
It i8 clear that
they are both excited, even sadistically exoited, and that


Big Mamma's feelings hav e no meaning for them at all, a only
the social form means something to them, so that it can be put
on record at a later date that they did and said all they should
have, and set their faces properly.
As characters they are overdrawn. But that is just as it
should be. They are almost an allegorical representation of
Humbug. They have the contempt for each other, the rude
familiarity and brittleness of a couple plotting murder. Mae
gives her husband an unexplained poke as she passes him, and he
returns this qith a quick slap, while all the time he continues
gazing at his mother. He even seems to enjoy the thought of
his father's death and agony. When Big Mamma tells them all
Big Daddy
how well ha/has been eating Gasper say B a 'with grim relish' -
'I hope he don't have to pay for it later on', and later he say s,
again with relish, that they (the cancer patients) certainly
do 'get sly' about their pain, meaning they often deny it.
And Mae, when the news has at last been broken to Big Mamma,
utters her wretched, 'That's why he's turned yellow, Homny!'
as if he were a thing of skin and bone, merely unpleagant to
handle.
The point is that Gooper and Mae are never in a living
contact with other people, only a kind of mental, observing one e
They prefer the saffey and sameness of purely social relations,
for in this way they are never hurt or involved by other people;
everything is fixed and prediotable, and their egotistical
interests cannot be deflected. For the techihoal civilieation
requires that people keep their distance from each other, there
being work to do and certain hours to do it in. A man can't
afford to lay himself open tp pain or passion. He can't go too


deep into life; strong feelings acknowledge no timetable,
and they bring in no money o
Nom Brick, Margaret, Big Mamma, even Big Daddy with his
ruthless pursuit of money-power, belong much more to the South,
in feeling.
It is this which gives them the power of honesty.
Their humanity has not yet been smothered under social forms.
The house and the plantation are still the mysterious and
eterhal background of their lives, or rather the only harmony
in their lives. But for Mae and Gooper the house and planatation
are simply an 'asset' : - to be managed on a strict techaical
basis. They are completely sold to the civilisation of the
North.
In the first version Brick says no more than a few words'
from beginning to end of the act. But his presence
bearing
Bad, unspoken reflections about men a 1s always felt. When
he comes in for the 'family conference' he goes straight to the
bar and begins pouring himself a drink, then, as if just
remembering his manners,RE turne to the others and says, 'I'M
sorry! Anyone else?' When Gooper and Mae oall on the doctor
t o- break the bad news - they do 8o like chairmen - - he suddenly
say 8, 'Sessh!' then 'grins and chuckles and shakes his head
regretfully'. - Naw! --that waen't the click', he says,
the click being his moment of lapse into a state of peace,
which comes every day after a certain number of drinks. He
has no reverence for social form; and with these two sentences
he has said enough to give his silence through the rest of the
act meaning and dramatic force. Just as Big Mamma is about
to realise the truth a cancer' - he begins singing, and Gooper
cries out, 'Shut up!'


Margaret is more outspoken.
She accuses Gooper of
avarice, ararice, greed, greed', ,and he almost strikes her.
She say B 'hissingly', to herself, 'Poisons, poisons, venomous
thoughts and words! In hearts and minde : That's poisons!'
As for Big Daddy, 9 he makes no appearance. We only hear
his first cry of agony from another room, as the disease really
takes hold of him. We do not know which of the two sons he
will favour in the inheritance. We do know that he loves Brick
and dislikes Gooper.
The inheritance is : in the first version--
a superficial element in the plot, and rightly so. There 1s only
the sense of a victory of, truth.
In the seoond, performed version all this is lost. Thé
Broadway producer's objection to the original version of the
third act was a valid one - that Big Daddy was too important
a character to be heard only as an off-stage ory. It is trué
that we do miss him, but his appearance in the revised version
does not help matters at all. In fact, it F to reducesthe
theme from the heroic and eesentially mysterious level to the
soclal one e It turns the play into the simple quéstion, 'Who
will he favour in his will, - the efficient Gooper or the
wayward, alcoholio Briok?' Big Daddy comes in, aware now
that he will certainly die of cancer, recites a ribald story
which is clearly directed against Gooper and his wife, whose
humbugging Brick has exposed by denying (only to Big Daddy)
the clinic's fake report, and he leaves again clearly intening.
to make his will in Brick's favour.
Gooper and his wife become milder people, but are lèss real
now in their malevolenoe. We no longer see them exnchanging
glances, nudgingand poking and making faces. A magnifioent


portrait of a mean, whispering couple a always hiding the
truth because, like all those without reverence in life, they
believe others can't bear to face it : - 1s bragtently diminished.
The starkness of the conflict - a truth or lies a is no longer
there. Everything is played down. The author removes the
phrases 'with grim relish' and 'with relish' from Gooper's two
unplesant remarks about his father's disease. Gooper now
answers the doctor's 'Keep your chin up, Big Mamma' with the
mild, 'She's goin' to keep her ole chin up, aren't you, Big
Mamma?' instead of the openly vulgar, 'She's gonna keep both
chins up, aren't you, Big Mamma?', as in the first version.
The italios are removed from Hae's 'That's why he turned yellow,
Mommy', stripping it of the sense of deliberate malevolence.
In the first version, when Big Mamma tells Mae that Gooper never
really liked Big Daddy, Mae answers 'as if terribly shocked',
'That'e not TRUE', whereas in the second version she anewers
simply (no stage directions), 'That'e not true', helping us to
see Gooper more as the unwanted son smarting againet Big Daddy's
neglect of him than as a. villain. But it is now too late for
our sympathies to be engaged on his behalf.
Brick becomes too much the decent fellow. He syaya too
much. He dramatises himself: 'I've lied to nobody, nobody but
myself... The time has come tp put me in Rainbow Hill, put me
cmucs donn
in Rainbow Hill, Maggie...
He d to the sentimental
look-at-me-I'm-suffering-but-keeping-hold-of-my-manhood-and-
swearwords mood, which is the most sickening in modern American
libtrature: 'Hello, moon,' a he is outside, addressing the
sky a - 'I envy you, you cool son of a bitoh'. And to Margaret
he says of the family conference - - what we
have e gathered


by this time - 'I oan't witness that thing in there'. His
mystery is gone, and with it the play's. There is an. unpleasant
get-together of (now) décent people : e Big Daddy, Brick and
Margaret a against Mae and Gooper, for whom we begin to feel
a rather ehameful sympathy. 'Ain't I tellin' this story in
decent language, Brick?' Big Daddy asks. a And the answer 1s,
'Yes, eir, too ruttin' deoent'.
The effects of the second version on Hargaret's personality
Prad
devestat mas,
perhaps more so, because
she
arë/as
originally
hone
had a superb robustness, with A adtatme of the Protestant
mixed usth ik,
Ideal of womanhood donteter all sweetnese and light, She
now remonstrates with Brick: he must do the decent thing and
cone in and stand by his mother during the family meeting.
She is reduced to 'oommon decency and fair play' talk, which
belongs to Gooper. Her 'avarice, avarice, greed, greed' loses
a the sting of ' its italics. She no longer hissee 'Poisons,
poisons! Venomous thought's and words!' but merely says it,
again without italics.
To fill the gap of a real confliot in the revised version
false dramatic trkicks, of an hysterical origin, are invoked.
There is a storm which, since the heroic thene' has been
dissplated, appears simply as an accident of the weather.
Sudden Bights and sounds are clearly designed to alarm and
disturb the audience in a second-rate Tashion.
'Chidren
commence crying... barnyard animals in terror, papers crackling,
sarvaul
shutters rattling...
Inexplicably, Daisy (a etTa) hits
together two leather pillows...
Strange man runs across lawn.'
The word : a play's only power in the end - - capitulates to
sight, which is proper to the film.


As we know, one of Big Daddy's great disappointments is
that Brick has no child. - Now in both versions Margaret decides
to foroe the situation by telling a lie: in the first version
she tells Big damma that. she is about to have a ohild, and Big
Mamma rushes off to tell her husband; in the second she tells
Big Daddy direct, and i8 probably this information is uppermost
in his mind when he goes out to prepare his will e
Gooper and
his wife know 1t is false, because Brick never sleeps with her.
And, naturally, Brick knows also: but he stands by Margaret.
In the first version he :simply say 8 nothing, and she is only
thankful that he does not interrupt her, which it is very like
him to do. But in the second version he comes forward and
vindicates her by telling another falsehood, that they have
beèn sleeping together - a quite unnecessary lapse of character,
too obvious for the delicate balance hitherto kept by the play e
But this 1s less serious than the fact that the end of
av learv enked
the play, which
afterthoughts in
the first version, is a degradation of the whole theme in the
second. In the firet version Maragaret forces Brick- to give
her a child by taking all the bottles of liquor out of the room,
then throwing his crutch out of the window' s0 that he can't walk.
She says, 'We're going to making the lie true, and when that's
done, I'll bring the liquor bàck here and we'll get drunk
together'. and Brick's last words : in answer to his wife's,
'I do love you, Brick, I do' - are 'Wouldn't it be funny if that
was true?' Now these words have been spoken before, by Big
Daddy, in cyniciem, when Big Mamma says muoh the same as Margaret
has just said. And 80 we are left with the feeling that the
mellow house and the plantation have won over the quarrels


and the poisonous thoughts', that life is to be repeated, in
children and further inheritance, with the sunlight still
coming through the shutters in the late afternoon.
But in the second version the element of eternity is
forgotten. The question of B19 Dada's inheritance settled,
there is only the (social) question of making a child, which
Brick, being decent now, understands. He watches his wife
with 'growing admiration' as she takes his pillow from his grasp
and throws it on to their double 'bed, showing that she will not
let him sleep alone on the couch.
She then begins throwing
his bottles of liquor out of the window, but he stays, still
admiring her, though even five minutes before he would probably
have preferred to throw himself out with the bottles. And this
version ends witha speech from dargaret which. is the quintessence
of a specially modern sort of humbug, a - used. to cover the sores
of technical civilisation. She pities the 'weak, beautiful
peopletho give up with such grace'; 'What you need', she say 8,
'is someone to take hold of you' : - which would be, all right if
we didn't know that what he really needs is another stiff drink.
Men like Brick : indeed, all men : ask something more of life
than what can be provided by other men, # or women. But it is
one of the nyths of the techincal society that men are sufficient
to mene
i Margaret say B something of the same kind in the first
version of Aot Inree too, but it: was not the last word in the
play, her viotory was not so clear and ordinary o Horeover,
in the revised version, her speech is lengthened in such.a way
that she seems to have dwindled from Maggie the Cat into a sweet,
rational nurse. But the story has been wrapped up. The


The characters have lost their claws. The author has reduced
his theme to the inspid morality of 'good will to all men'.
How absolute the collapse is!
Yet there is a great purity and gentleness in Tennessee
Williams' work : especially in his portraits of women. How,
then, was it poseible for him to turn Margaret from a real
creature into a social formula?
She is called Maggie the Cat,
after all. In the first act she shows off her figure to Brick
as she stands in front of the mirror, and say 8 it still makes
men turn their heàds in the street. And when he tells her that
he is disgusted with her. talk she calls him an 'ass-aching
Puritan'.
A clue to this -: and to the author's collapse into social
formulae generally a a may be found in the Preface to the play,
called Person -
Dls
to Person. He begins by saying how sad and
embarrassing" it is that the artist's work should alway 8 be
rooted in his own "particular and sometimes peculiar concerns'.
It is sad because it is such a lonely condition: we are cut off
from each other, exiled each in his own skin, so to speak, and
our efforts to get in touch with each other are a terrible strain
on us. So for the most part what we hear is social chit-chat
of the kind Big Daddy has had enough of.
This of'course is in great part the theme of the play -
the terrible difficulty of speaking our truth to other people,
the effort it needs to think through the s0cial humbug by which
we are surrounded. 'Yeah, it's -: hard t' -: talk...' Bays
Big Daddy, re-eohoing the complaint we have heard from bothg
Brick and Margaret. Most of the second act is taken up with
a long conversation between Big Daddy and Brick during whloh they


try a a and for the' first time succeed : in having a really
'true' talk. Big Daddy tells Brick that he 18 drinking because
he did not face up to the truth of Skipper's homosexuality, he
let social disapproval get in the way of friendship; and, in
return for this truth, Brick tells his father that the latest
report from the clinic is false, and that he will die after all.
During the conversation Big Mamma keeps bursting in, wanting to
make peace all the time, frightened lest the talk will go too
deep and touch on a truth she does not want to hear. Gosper
puts his prepared, I'm-a-solid-chap-you-know face round the door,
and,his children, the 'Little Ones' : the very mask of Humbug
itself : sing,'we want Big Dad-dee: We want big Dad-dee!'
Everywhere the emphasis is on lying. + 'Have you ever heard
wond
of the,mendacity?' Briok asks his father. And at the end of
the act Big Daddy storms orethe stage crying, 'CHRIST - DAMN
ALL a LYING SONS OF - LYING BITCHES!' Then, 'Yes, all liars,
all liars, all lying dying liars!'
It is a wondeful brave cry against the kind of world that
gives rise to the sweet, ràtional philosophy of 'good will to all
men' - a the world of level, affectionate relations between
people beneath which the true violent feelings smart and burn and
corrode, so that men of great character like Big Daddy live their
lives like 'a closed fist' and the physical manifestation of this
dreadful inner tumult a - demaning safe smiles and mild, aweet
phrases as an outward accompaniment - a is cancer. We are made to
feel by the play that cancer, with its agonising pain and its
rapid, invisible proliferation, is only the bodily rèsult of trying i
the
to live 6 not, like a human creature, in hate and love, t -
oppaoites that go together in equal strength, dwindling and


increasing together, in equal degree - but like a social
formula, alway 8 reasonable, full of 'affection', and with
occasionaly swift, muted darte of hatred, contempt and murderous
revenge inside, quickly suppressed and never spoken about, like
the first warnings of the fatal stage of cancer. It is a very
American problem, as cancer, but. above all the terror of oancer,
saan veny
american diseases. It is the dead end of the
European middle class culture.
It is precisely the will to: cover over life with social
formulae of behaviour that gives rise to the feeling that our
passions - publicly revealed at last in art. - a are 'sad and
embarrassing'.
Men who are ashamed of thetr own feelings
produce 'experimental' or decorative writing. But Williams
is not like that. He writes in good faith. But in the end
he does not make an absolute break with social formulae. He
gives the impression in his Preface that he is writing in order
to. communicate with other people. Ànd that is a social activity.
Stendhal's
There is no sense ofl'vers 1880...' as there is again and again
in European books, even today. There is no sense of posterity,
. and this means that there is no sense of tradition. lie age each
our
of ue alone a a condemned to solitary confinement inside a skinf.
And while we are alive - a 'Meanwhile!" the author say B - we try
as best we can to over come the barriers to communication. Of
course Tennessee Williams is talking aboût the sense of exile
which is our special state nowadays, unpreoendented in Christendom.
But he is also talking about the condition of the artist, and the
artist is never unprecendented, he is always in connection, with
the past, BO that he may bring it into new illumination. The
impresaion one gets from this Preface is not that of an artist


trying to penetrate the mystery of his life, but that of a man
simply tryi ing to tell the truth to other people, the truth about
himself and thus about their lives too. At the very outset, it
seems, there is a bewilderment of values.
There is no sense here of a religious task for the artist,
no sense of a mystery altogether beyond the world of you and me,
a my stery in which we are no longer exiles from each other but
under the same destiny (thid is what makes the difference between
truth and lies, that we do belong to each other).
In the play this mystery ie suggested by the house and
plantation, but then there is little continuity of feeling
there are only sudden brilliant confliots, followed by a lapée e
It is l1ke a man bravely struggling up all the time, but falling,
because there are no voices inside his head to keep him calm and
give him advice. It is art pushed into a vacuum because your
audience believes that the only really serious activity in life
ie the production of goods and that to each man falls a technical
funotion beyond which he has. only a questionable being. Éven
the author suggests something of this kind: he gives
the feeling
you
that a play, when it is finished, ighanded over to the technical
experts of the theatre
producers and 80 on a and becomes from
that time' on a technical problem. But in fact the ideas of a
play, even in performance, is a very simple one. Peasants do 1t
very well. And the 'teohnical advice' is more often. than not
simply an objection to the values and feelings. of the play, and
express only the shames and fears of the producer, who is often
quite a social mano
That Williams felt he was going against himself in taking his
producer's advice is clear from what he say B in the 'Note of