The Seacoast Rep offers a new look at Tennessee Williams’ classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
When actor and playwright David Roby was named the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., in 2010, he wanted to do something to honor one of America’s most famous playwrights.
The university was set to mark the centennial of Williams’ birth in 2011 with various festivals and celebrations. Roby set out to interview Williams’ surviving friends and family and planned to write a play based on his research.
“My intention was to give Williams a gift for his birthday, but it became much bigger than that,” Roby says.
How big? What was supposed to be a year-long fellowship turned into a two-year investigation, the results of which have changed the scholarship around Williams’ plays. It also brought Roby from his home in Birmingham, Ala., to the Seacoast, where he’s starring in the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s upcoming production of Williams’ classic play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” on stage Oct. 2-25. And alongside “Cat,” Roby will perform “Sometimes There’s God So Quickly,” his one-man show based on his research about Williams.
Roby calls his research a “very synchronistic journey” — he traveled across the country, from New York to Key West, Fla., and from St. Louis to various stops along the Mississippi Delta, meeting and interviewing Williams’ friends and relations. Many times, finding a contact was pure luck; he’d interview someone who’d point him toward a new subject, and that new subject would connect him with someone else.
Along the way, he started seeing hints of a previously unseen metaphor in one of Williams’ most famous plays, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The name of Blanche DuBois, the play’s tragic heroine, translates to “white woods” — according to Roby, Blanche’s name is specifically a reference to the white oaks Williams saw growing outside his bedroom window when he was a child. Blanche’s sister’s name, Stella, is also a reference to white oaks (the species quercus stellata, Roby says), and the play doubles as Williams’ lament over the clear-cutting of trees along the Mississippi Delta.
“Williams was doing something clever here that we really didn’t understand,” he says. “He had to name these characters these names, or else it wouldn’t work in his mind. … It’s like a cryptogram.”
Roby later presented his findings to a group of Williams scholars. He was worried, he says — his ideas ran counter to established scholarship. But they found acceptance.
“Someone said … ‘Even if it was not Williams’ intention, you’ve found his subconscious,’” he says.
From his research, Roby wrote “Sometimes There’s God So Quickly,” in which he portrays 19 of the characters he met during his two-year investigation. And that’s how he was cast in the Rep’s production. He and director Meredith Freeman-Caple were students together at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in the 1990s, where Roby had played Brick in a student production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” After meeting up again at a recent reunion and seeing his performance in “Sometimes There’s God So Quickly,” Freeman-Caple asked Roby to audition for the role again.
Top of page: David Roby stars as Brick and Constance Witman is Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Above: Constance Witman as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre in Portsmouth. photo by Michael Winters
“I’ve always wanted to do it (again),” Roby says. “I was too young to do it before, too young psychologically and emotionally.”
“Cat” is the story of the Pollitt family, a Southern clan in decline. Big Daddy, the family’s patriarch, is dying, though he doesn’t quite know it. Brick, his son, is in a strained marriage with Maggie (played at the Rep by Constance Witman), and questions linger about the relationship between Brick and his long-time friend, Skipper, who recently committed suicide. As the family gathers to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday, tensions rise and secrets are revealed.
Roby says his research, along with two decades of life experience, have opened up new dimensions in the play for him.
“In the past, I played that futility — that Brick is resigned, and that he’s not really in love with Maggie. … That’s all I knew when I was 21. But now I’m married, and I know what it’s like to struggle in a relationship, but also to make it work,” he says.
Traveling from Alabama to New Hampshire for the play has also been a positive experience, he says.
“I feel like I was embraced the moment I got here,” he says. “I’ve never been in a read-through of a play where, when I got home, I had emails and Facebook messages waiting for me, saying, ‘I’m so glad you’re here!’ … I love it so much that I’m considering moving here.”
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is on stage Oct. 2-25, Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays–Saturdays at 8 p.m. with a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturdays and Sundays, at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, 125 Bow St., Portsmouth. David Roby’s “Sometimes There’s God So Quickly” runs on Oct. 7, 14, and 25 at 7 p.m. Tickets at seacoastrep.org or 603-433-4472.