Act I

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof lakes place entirely in the bed-sitting room of the Pollitt plantation home in the Mississippi Delta. The plantation once belonged to a pair of bachelors, and it still shows evidence of their taste for "the Victorian with a touch of the Far East." Big Daddy had once worked for them as an overseer, now he owns the plantation and most of the land for miles around, having spent his life building it into a dynastic empire, "twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile." It is Big Daddy Pollitt's sixty-fifth birthday, and he is in an especially celebratory mood because he has just received the results of exploratory surgery: the pains in his stomach are not due to cancer as he had feared for three years but are merely the pangs of a spastic colon...