She almost stops being fat

Twenty years after reading it, I still remember this evocative, surreal stage direction from Tennessee Williams

I was a rather lacking student in college. I skipped a lot of classes, skimmed a lot of reading assignments, and generally phoned it in whenever possible.

Some classes—and some professors—stuck with me however. My class on American Playwrights has held occupancy in my head for 20 years now. I still have my copies of Iceman Cometh, Death of a Salesman, Zoo Story, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

I wasn’t even much of a theater person, but reading these plays opened me to a different type of storytelling. Where the audience is asked to suspend disbelief just a bit more than the movies, but with a theatrical flair that novels just couldn’t do.

And there’s one line that has stuck with more than any other. And it’s not even a line of dialogue, but a stage direction.

Tennessee Williams

In that class, we read two plays by Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Both have been talked about endlessly. Both have movie adaptations.

And both have a centralized motif that Williams seemed obsessed with: how body image plays into a person’s value.

Tennessee Williams, American playwright; cropped from photo of Williams with cake for 20th anniversary of “The Glass Menagerie”

In A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche DuBois’s fading beauty reflects her psychological doom. A woman of that time cannot age gracefully.

In Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Brick’s athletic body becomes a prison of self-hatred. Especially after he is injured and on crutches, referring to himself as a “cripple.”

But the one character who stood out to me was Ida “Big Mama” Pollitt. Her size is used to show how society and her family ignore her. They ignore the emotional reality under the surface—the long ignored, suffering wife of the 1950s.

For much of the play, she’s almost comic relief for the rest of the cast.

Reading the play is much different than watching it. Williams wrote some of the most detailed, and lyrical stage directions in the text. Take this stage direction for Brick as an example:

[Brick smiles and bows slightly, making a burlesque gesture of gallantry for Maggie to pass before him into the room. Then he hobbles on his crutch directly to the liquor cabinet and there is absolute silence, with everybody looking at Brick as everybody has always looked at Brick when he spoke or moved or appeared. One by one he drops ice cubes in his glass, then suddenly, but not quickly, looks back over his shoulder with a wry, charming smile and says:]

BRICK: I’m sorry! Anyone else?

If you’ve ever been in a play or simply read one, you’ll know that stage direction are typically matter-of-fact. The actors are meant to interpret through the dialogue and small instructions how to present a moment to the audience.

How does an actor move in silence as “everybody looks” at him as “everybody as always looked at” him? It’s beautifully written, but it’s not meant for the audience. It’s meant for the directors and actors.

It’s just after this section that we get the stage direction that I can’t stop thinking about. The rest of the family has received news about a cancer diagnosis for Big Daddy (Ida’s husband and the patriarch of the family).

Big Mama has been in the dark. Again, ignored. Emotionally invalidated.

BIG MAMA [terrified, rising]:Is there? Something? Something that I? Don’t—Know?

[In these few words, this startled, very soft, question, Big Mama reviews the history of her forty-five years with Big Daddy, her great, almost embarrassingly true-hearted and simple-minded devotion to Big Daddy, who must have had something Brick has, who made himself loved so much by the “simple expedient” of not loving enough to disturb his charming detachment, also once coupled like Brick’s, with virile beauty.

[Big Mama has a dignity at this moment: she almost stops being fat.]

Photo of my copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The stage direction almost feels nonsensical, and certainly indicative of the time. How would something like that be received in 2025?

In Susan Neal Mayberry’s essay “A study of Illusion and the Grotesque in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” she discusses Williams’ use of "the grotesque” (exaggerated physical traits) to both accentuate and hide each characters’ emotional journey

Although each of these characters is allowed for a time to hide behind his grotesqueness, to conceal his true nature behind calculated illusion, each figure is relentlessly and totally exposed. Reverend Tooker's hypocritical piety is revealed; Mae and Gooper finally relinquish the "nice" approach and make their self-interest and resentment shockingly clear, and Big Mama is forced to confront her husband's disgust with her at the same time she learns of his cancer.

— Susan Neal Mayberry, “A study of Illusion and the Grotesque in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”

It’s hard to say why I keep thinking of this line. Maybe because it was off putting at the time? Or simply a product of the time?

I think what strikes me, though, is that in some way, it made sense. I could see it. Not that someone can stop being fat, but that for the first time, every other character stopped seeing her as a caricature. Stopped seeing her as a woman to be ignored or talked over.

It was one of the most human moments in the whole script.