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While discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Michael Hinden wrote: “Tragedy incarnates pain, annihilates structure, threatens hope, and yet . . . also has the power to sweep us up in the tow of powerful personalities whose grand passions and embellished language draw us into solidarity with—what?—dream images, really : towering characters who are at bottom insubstantial and subject to dissolution before our eyes, uniting us in collective emotion” (Hinden 113). Hinden’s words remind me of how, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello portrays a grand ensemble of “towering characters”—huge-spirited beings who do, nonetheless, eventually “dissol[ve]” into “collective emotion.” Pirandello also reveals to us the author’s terror in dealing with some of these characters: those who will not cooperatively join the collective ensemble but instead assert their will to dominate over the other characters, and the constellation of themes, and the total scheme of the plot, and the stagecraft devices, and all else. I was reminded again of this Pirandellian perspective when reading , during recent summers, more than twenty draft versions of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, besides other related Williams documents, at ¤ve different U.S. research libraries. There I saw how twenty-four years of work on the Cat writing project caused Williams at times to be plagued by would-be dominator characters (who sometimes had living human allies, chie®y Elia Kazan, to abet them in their quest for primacy over other characters 5 Four Characters in Search of a Company Williams, Pirandello, and the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Manuscripts Jeffrey B. Loomis within the cast). By contrast, the 1975 ¤nal revision of Cat has, I think, achieved a wonderfully balanced ensemble of the various characters—one that Kazan sometimes helped to evoke, by urging Williams to develop Maggie and Big Mama as characters more completely , but also a balance that Kazan for a long time apparently contravened , through insisting that the character of Brick needed to make personality-altering, and evidently somewhat noisy, onstage transformations. To a degree, the character of Big Daddy also sometimes threatened to overdominate the Cat ensemble in certain versions of the play text—whether this threat also came about solely as a result of Kazan’s ardent interest in Big Daddy or whether it perhaps resulted from Williams’s taunting of Kazan’s zeal to magnify this character. But in any case, the drafts of Cat do reveal several directions in which this script could have gone and sometimes did go—all of which might, indeed, prove intriguing to deconstructionist, wouldbe revisionist readers of the text. Like such a deconstructionist reader, I can ¤nd other Williams plays—especially The Rose Tattoo— inviting me to treat draft variants of the play often as really “playable ” alternatives to the published drama. Contrariwise, though, in the case of the Cat manuscripts, many drafted alternatives seem only chaotic approximations of the ultimately polished American Shakespeare Festival production version published by New Directions in 1975. Such drafts’ qualities of chaos resemble the inanity that the Pirandellian Six Characters at times nearly impose upon the Author character in that play. Therefore, I cannot but be conservatively minded toward the manuscript history of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I ¤nd the entire manuscript progress toward the 1975 Cat altogether necessary—and would never be able to laud most of the earlier assaults that were made on the playwright from, or on behalf of, overly “towering” characters. Williams ¤rst created the Pollitt family of characters in “Three Players of a Summer Game,” a short story he began in Venice in 1951 and revised many times before the Pollitts found their way to the stage in Cat. The story occurs in the 1920s, so the character known there as Brick (and at ¤rst as Brick Bishop, not Pollitt) would have had a ¤ctively historical birth date less like that of the later-tobe -dramatized Brick than like that of the play’s Big Daddy. The short story’s characters also have rather different ¤ctive biographies from 92 Jeffrey B. Loomis the playscript cast, and in the story it is a rather masculine, perhaps even lesbian Maggie who refuses to have sex with Brick (Texas 1— Subfolder 7: 3,7). Such details, however, do not seem most important about the “Three Players” short story in its many drafts. What does stand out in the oft-revised tale is its constant Pirandellian sense of life’s inherent...

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