Tennessee Williams had all the romanticism stripped from him by the second world war. The protagonists of his major plays, written in the late ‘40s and 50s, are all characters who are notably lonely, despite being surrounded with people. The isolation, the simple lack of human communication was strongly present in his arguably his most famous work The Glass Menagerie and a theme he returned to in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

On this day, March 24, in 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway, with a liberal interpretation of his original script. Director Ella Kazan thought the story-ending bitter exchange between the wife and husband too unpalatable for viewers’ tastes and urged Williams to tone it down for his production.

Williams expressed some reservation at changing such a central theme of his play, writing that “The moral paralysis of Brick”, the husband, “was a root thing” in his tragedy, and to show a dramatic progression “would obscure the meaning of that tragedy.” Still he did not want to lose Kazan and acceded to the request. Williams got a chance to reprise his third act two decades later, with a revival production. He did not fully revert back to his original script, but his ending was more ambivalent and less sweet than the reconciliation scene of Kazan’s version.