Three Plays of Tennessee Williams

by Tennessee Williams

  BRICK: Christ!

  BIG DADDY: I'm just saying I understand such—

  BRICK [violently]: Skipper is dead. I have not quit eating!

  BIG DADDY: No, but you started drinking.

  [Brick wheels on his crutch and hurls his glass across the room shouting.]

  BRICK: YOU THINK SO, TOO?

  BIG DADDY: Shhh!

  [Footsteps run on the gallery. There are women's calls. Big Daddy goes toward the door.]

  Go 'way!—Just broke a glass....

  [Brick is transformed, as if a quiet mountain blew suddenly up in volcanic flame.]

  BRICK: You think so, too? You think so, too? You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!—sodomy!—together?

  BIG DADDY: Hold—!

  BRICK: That what you—

  BIG DADDY: —ON—a minute!

  BRICK: You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'—

  BIG DADDY: Why are you shouting like that? Why are you—

  BRICK: —me, is that what you think of Skipper, is that—

  BIG DADDY: —so excited? I don't think nothing. I don't know nothing. I'm simply telling you what—

  BRICK: You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men?

  BIG DADDY: Now that's—

  BRICK: Straw? Ochello? A couple of—

  BIG DADDY: Now just—

  BRICK: —fucking sissies? Queers? Is that what you—

  BIG DADDY: Shhh.

  BRICK: —think?

  [He loses his balance and pitches to his knees without noticing the pain. He grabs the bed and drags himself up.]

  BIG DADDY: Jesus!—Whew.... Grab my hand!

  BRICK: Naw, I don't want your hand....

  BIG DADDY: Well, I want yours. Git up!

  [He draws him up, keeps an arm about him with concern and affection.]

  You broken out in a sweat! You're panting like you'd run a race with—

  BRICK [freeing himself from his father's hold]: Big Daddy, you shock me, Big Daddy, you, you—shock me! Talkin' so—

  [He turns away from his father.]

  —casually!—about a—thing like that...

  —Don't you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted they are by things like that? Why, at Ole Miss when it was discovered a pledge to our fraternity, Skipper's and mine, did a, attempted to do a, unnatural thing with—We not only dropped him like a hot rock!—We told him to git off the campus, and he did, he got!—All the way to—

  [He halts, breathless.]

  BIG DADDY: —Where?

  BRICK: —North Africa, last I heard!

  BIG DADDY: Well, I have come back from further away than that, I have just now returned from the other side of the moon, death's country, son, and I'm not easy to shock by anything here.

  [He comes downstage and faces out.]

  Always, anyhow, lived with too much space around me to be infected by ideas of other people. One thing you can grow on a big place more important than cotton!—is tolerance!—I grown it.

  [He returns toward Brick.]

  BRICK: Why can't exceptional friendship, real, real, deep, deep friendship! between two men be respected as something clean and decent without being thought of as—

  BIG DADDY: It can, it is, for God's sake.

  BRICK: —Fairies....

  [In his utterance of this word, we gauge the wide and profound reach of the conventional mores he got from the world that crowned him with early laurel.]

  BIG DADDY: I told Mae an' Gooper—

  BRICK: Frig Mae and Gooper, frig all dirty lies and liars!—Skipper and me had a clean, true thing between us!—had a clean friendship, practically all our lives, till Maggie got the idea you're talking about. Normal? No!—It was too rare to be normal, any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal. Oh, once in a while he put his hand on my shoulder or I'd put mine on his, oh, maybe even, when we were touring the country in pro-football an' shared hotel-rooms we'd reach across the space between the two beds and shake hands to say goodnight, yeah, one or two times we—

  BIG DADDY: Brick, nobody thinks that that's not normal!

  BRICK: Well, they're mistaken, it was! It was a pure an' true thing an' that's not normal.

  [They both stare straight at each other for a long moment. The tension breaks and both turn away as if tired.]

  BIG DADDY: Yeah, it's—hard t'—talk....

  BRICK: All right, then, let's—let it go....

  BIG DADDY: Why did Skipper crack up? Why have you?

  [Brick looks back at his father again. He has already decided, without knowing that he has made this decision, that he is going to tell his father that he is dying of cancer. Only this could even the score between them | one inadmissible thing in return for another.]

  BRICK [ominously]: All right. You're asking for it, Big Daddy. We're finally going to have that real true talk you wanted. It's too late to stop it, now, we got to carry it through and cover every subject.

  [He hobbles back to the liquor cabinet.]

  Uh-huh.

  [He opens the ice bucket and picks up the silver tongs with slow admiration of their frosty brightness.]

  Maggie declares that Skipper and I went into pro-football after we left 'Ole Miss' because we were scared to grow up...

  [He moves downstage with the shuffle and clop of a cripple on a crutch. As Margaret did when her speech became' recitative', he looks out into the house, commanding its attention by his direct, concentrated gaze—a broken, 'tragically elegant' figure telling simply as much as he knows of the 'Truth']

  —Wanted to—keep on tossing—those long, long!—high, high!—passes that—couldn't be intercepted except by time, the aerial attack that made us famous! And so we did, we did, we kept it up for one season, that aerial attack, we held it high!—Yeah, but——that summer, Maggie, she laid the law down to me, said, Now or never, and so I married Maggie....

  BIG DADDY: How was Maggie in bed?

  BRICK [wryly]: Great! the greatest!

  [Big Daddy nods as if be thought so.]

  She went on the road that fall with the Dixie Stars. Oh, she made a great show of being the world's best sport. She wore a—wore a—tall bearskin cap! A shako, they call it, a dyed moleskin coat, a moleskin coat dyed red!—Cut up crazy! Rented hotel ballrooms for victory celebrations, wouldn't cancel them when it—turned out—defeat.... MAGGIE THE CAT! Ha ha!

  [Big Daddy nods.]

  —But Skipper, he had some fever which came back on him which doctors couldn't explain and I got that injury—turned out to be just a shadow on the X-ray plate—and a touch of bursitis.... I lay in a hospital bed, watched our games on TV, saw Maggie on the bench next to Skipper when he was hauled out of a game for stumbles, fumbles!—Burned me up the way she hung on his arm!—Y'know, I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left out because she and me never got any closer together than two people just get in bed, which is not much closer than two cats on a—fence humping.... So! She took this time to work on poor dumb Skipper. He was a less than average student at Ole Miss, you know that, don't you?!—Poured in his mind the dirty, false idea that what we were, him and me, was a frustrated case of that ole pair of sisters that lived in this room, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello!—He, poor Skipper, went to bed with Maggie to prove it wasn't true, and when it didn't work out, he thought it was true!—Skipper broke in two like a rotten stick—nobody ever turned so fast to a lush—or died of it so quick.... —Now are you satisfied?

  [Big Daddy has listened to this story, dividing the grain from the chaff. Now he looks at his son.]

  BIG DADDY: Are you satisfied?

  BRICK: With what?

  BIG DADDY: That half-ass story!

  BRICK: What's half-ass about it?

  BIG DADDY: Something's left out of that story. What did you leave out?

  [The phone has started ringing in the hall. As if it reminded him of something, Brick glances suddenly toward the sound and says:]

  BRICK: Yes!—
I left out a long-distance call which I had from Skipper, in which he made a drunken confession to me and on which I hung up!—last time we spoke to each other in our lives....

  [Muted ring stops as someone answers phone in a soft, indistinct voice in hall.]

  BIG DADDY: You hung up?

  BRICK: Hung up. Jesus! Well—

  BIG DADDY: Anyhow now!—we have tracked down the lie with which you're disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you'd face truth with him!

  BRICK: His truth, not mine!

  BIG DADDY: His truth, okay! But you wouldn't face it with him!

  BRICK: Who can face truth? Can you?

  BIG DADDY: Now don't start passin' the rotten buck again, boy!

  BRICK: How about these birthday congratulations, these many, many happy returns of the day, when ev'rybody but you knows there won't be any!

  [Whoever has answered the hall phone lets out a high, shrill laugh; the voice becomes audible saying: 'no, no, you got it all wrong! Upside down! Are you crazy?' | Brick suddenly catches his breath as he realises that he has made a shocking disclosure. He hobbles a few paces, then freezes, and without looking at his father's shocked face, says:]

  Let's, let's—go out, now, and—

  [Big Daddy moves suddenly forward and grabs hold of the boy's crutch like it was a weapon for which they were fighting for possession.]

  BIG DADDY: Oh, no, no! No one's going out! What did you start to say?

  BRICK: I don't remember.

  BIG DADDY: 'Many happy returns when they know there won't be any'?

  BRICK: Aw, hell, Big Daddy, forget it. Come on out on the gallery and look at the fireworks they're shooting off for your birthday....

  BIG DADDY: First you finish that remark you were makin' before you cut off. 'Many happy returns when they know there won't be any'?—Ain't that what you just said?

  BRICK: Look, now. I can get around without that crutch if I have to but it would be a lot easier on the furniture an' glassware if I didn' have to go swinging along like Tarzan of th'—

  BIG DADDY: FINISH WHAT YOU WAS SAYIN'!

  [An eerie green glow shows in sky behind him.]

  BRICK [sucking the ice in his glass, speech becoming thick]: Leave th' place to Gooper and Mae an' their five little same little monkeys. All I want is—

  BIG DADDY: 'LEAVE TH' PLACE,' did you say?

  BRICK [vaguely]: All twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.

  BIG DADDY: Who said I was 'leaving the place' to Gooper or anybody? This is my sixty-fifth birthday! I got fifteen years or twenty years left in me! I'll outlive you! I'll bury you an' have to pay for your coffin!

  BRICK: Sure. Many happy returns. Now let's go watch the fireworks, come on, let's—

  BIG DADDY: Lying, have they been lying? About the report from th'—clinic? Did they, did they—find something?—Cancer. Maybe?

  BRICK: Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an' death's the other....

  [He takes the crutch from Big Daddy's loose grip and swings out on the gallery leaving the doors open. A song, 'Pick a Bale of Cotton', is heard.]

  MAE [appearing in door]: Oh, Big Daddy, the field-hands are singin' fo' you!

  BIG DADDY [shouting hoarsely]: BRICK! BRICK!

  MAE: He's outside drinkin', Big Daddy.

  BIG DADDY: BRICK!

  [Mae retreats, awed by the passion of his voice. Children call Brick in tones mocking Big Daddy. His face crumbles like broken yellow plaster about to fall into dust. | There is a glow in the sky. Brick swings back through the doors, slowly, gravely, quite soberly.]

  BRICK: I'm sorry, Big Daddy. My head don't work any more and it's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking. In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful—I don't know but—anyway—we've been friends... —And being friends is telling each other the truth.... [There is a pause.] You told me! I told you!

  [A child rushes into the room and grabs a fistful of fire-crackers, and runs out again.]

  CHILD [screaming]: Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

  BIG DADDY [slowly and passionately]: CHRIST—DAMN— ALL—LYING SONS OF—LYING BITCHES!

  [He straightens at last and crosses to the inside door. At the door he turns and looks back as if he had some desperate question he couldn't put into words. Then he nods reflectively and says in a hoarse voiced]

  Yes, all liars, all liars, all lying dying liars!

  [This is said slowly, slowly, with a fierce revulsion. He goes on out.]

  —Lying! Dying! Liars!

  [His voice dies out. There is the sound of a child being slapped. It rushes, hideously bawling, through room and out the hall door. Brick remains motionless as the lights dim out and the curtain falls.]

  CURTAIN

  ACT THREE

  {Note: This was the original 3rd act. An updated version is found at the end of this act 3 along with Williams' explanation.}

  There is no lapse of time.

  Mae enters with Reverend Tooker.

  MAE: Where is Big Daddy! Big Daddy?

  BIG MAMA [entering]: Too much smell of burnt fireworks makes me feel a little bit sick at my stomach.—Where is Big Daddy?

  MAE: That's what I want to know, where has Big Daddy gone?

  BIG MAMA: He must have turned in, I reckon he went to baid....

  [Gooper enters.]

  GOOPER: Where is Big Daddy?

  MAE: We don't know where he is!

  BIG MAMA: I reckon he's gone to baid.

  GOOPER: Well, then, now we can talk.

  BIG MAMA: What is this talk, what talk?

  [Margaret appears on gallery, talking to Dr Baugh.]

  MARGARET [musically]: My family freed their slaves ten years before abolition, my great-great-grandfather gave his slaves their freedom five years before the war between the States started!

  MAE: Oh, for God's sake! Maggie's climbed back up in her family tree!

  MARGARET [sweetly]: What, Mae?—Oh, where's Big Daddy?!

  [The pace must be very quick. Great Southern animation.]

  BIG MAMA [addressing them all]: I think Big Daddy was just worn out. He loves his family, he loves to have them around him, but it's a strain on his nerves. He wasn't himself tonight, Big Daddy wasn't himself, I could tell he was all worked up.

  REVEREND TOOKER: I think he's remarkable.

  BIG MAMA: Yaisss! Just remarkable. Did you all notice the food he ate at that table? Did you all notice the supper he put away? Why, he ate like a hawss!

  GOOPER: I hope he doesn't regret it.

  BIG MAMA: Why, that man—ate a huge piece of cawn-bread with molasses on it! Helped himself twice to hoppin' John.

  MARGARET: Big Daddy loves hoppin' john.—We had a real country dinner.

  BIG MAMA [overlapping Margaret]: Yais, he simply adores it! An' candied yams? That man put away enough food at that table to stuff a nigger field-hand!

  GOOPER [with grim relish]: I hope he don't have to pay for it later on....

  BIG MAMA [fiercely]: What's that, Gooper?

  MAE: Gooper says he hopes Big Daddy doesn't suffer tonight.

  BIG MAMA: Oh, shoot, Gooper says, Gooper says! Why should Big Daddy suffer for satisfying a normal appetite? There's nothin' wrong with that man but nerves, he's sound as a dollar! And now he knows he is an' that's why he ate such a supper. He had a big load off his mind, knowin' he wasn't doomed t'—what he thought he was doomed to....

  MARGARET [sadly and sweetly]: Bless his old sweet soul....

  BIG MAMA [v
aguely]: Yais, bless his heart, wher's Brick?

  MAE: Outside.

  GOOPER: —Drinkin'...

  BIG MAMA: I know he's drinkin'. You all don't have to keep tellin' me Brick is drinkin'. Cain't I see he's drinkin' without you continually tellin' me that boy's drinkin'?

  MARGARET: Good for you, Big Mama!