“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the story of a former football stud hiding his homosexuality from his frustrated wife, his domineering father and himself, was written by Tennessee Williams in 1955. But Sam Gold, the Tony Award-winning director of “Fun Home” and “A Doll’s House Part 2,” argues its themes of greed and deceit, repression and desire will resonate in fresh ways with modern audiences.
“It’s a play where there are people trying to lie and take advantage of other people’s vulnerabilities so they can come out on top,” Gold says. “It’s about a father and a son who talk about mendacity, and that word, mendacity, is a word that should be on the tip of our tongues today. Tennessee Williams was living in a time of great mendacity, and so are we.”
So Gold has set about reviving Williams’ drama with the help of Seaview, a company that previously worked with the director on his recent revivals of “An Enemy of the People” and “Romeo + Juliet.” It will mark their fifth collaboration. The group successfully won the rights to stage the show from the Williams Estate’s new custodians at International Literary Properties in a competitive situation. Greg Nobile,
Seaview’s co-founder and CEO, says Gold impressed the estate’s managers with his vision for the play, sharing a pitch deck filled with production and casting ideas.
“Sam shines in moments like that,” Nobile says. “He has these big, bold takes on the work, but he does them with such reverence and such respect for their authors.”
Gold says the new production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” will debut on Broadway in the spring of 2027, marking the first revival of the classic drama since 2013. That show starred Scarlett Johansson, Benjamin Walker, and Ciarán Hinds as Maggie, Brick and Big Daddy, and other Broadway and West End productions have been led by the likes of Kathleen Turner, Ashley Judd, Sienna Miller, Jack O’Connell, James Earl Jones and Anika Noni Rose. Gold says he has ideas about who might play the central roles, but he won’t divulge who he has been talking to about leading the revival.
“It’s delightful to cast,” Gold says. “I’m at the very beginning of the process, but these are three of the greatest roles in theater, so it’s an actor’s dream to play them.”
Many of the shows that Gold has mounted on Broadway, from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “King Lear” to Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” have been canonical. But he’s developed a reputation for his dramatic reinterpretations of these classics, setting “King Lear,” for instance, on a set that looked like the lobby of Trump Tower, or offering a more grounded version of “The Glass Menagerie” that centered the dream-like story in reality. It sounds like he may take a similar approach to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” by looking to do something novel and unexpected with a well-known play.
“It’s going to be radical,” Nobile says. “Sam has a way of examining classic texts and stripping them back so they feel like they are happening in the moment that we are in. In this case, Sam wants to push at the edges of how a family unravels.”
For Gold, it’s another opportunity to reexamine the plays and playwrights who continue to influence future generations.
“My primary interest is in working with the world’s greatest actors on texts that will challenge me and challenge them,” Gold says. “That means I need to find pieces of writing deep enough and challenging enough that I can sink my teeth into them. I’m always looking for something that I feel I can fail at — something big and scary that asks questions about life and death and the universe. These older plays have stood the test of time because they get at some of those great questions.”
Development of this production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was supported by Adam Zell and the
production will be managed on Broadway by 101 Productions. The rights deal was brokered on behalf of International Literary Properties by its VP of Business & Legal Affairs Jessica Mariani and Mel Kenyon of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, and for Seaview by David Manella of Loeb & Loeb. Kent Nicholson, SVP of ILP Theatrical, will oversee with Barra.
