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Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Comes To Barking Legs Theater

by

Theater & Dance

Desire. Shame. Family. Truth. And all the things we refuse to say out loud. 

Seed Theatre presents Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Mixy Mixon, a queer theatre artist whose own artistic journey is uniquely connected to Tennessee Williams and his legacy.

Mixon was one of the first recipients of the Tennessee Williams Fellowship, funding that helped make their education possible and supported their pursuit of degrees in Theatre and Women’s & Gender Studies.

Now, years later, Mixon returns to Williams’ work from the other side of that education—not only as a director and theatre-maker, but as a queer artist examining the work of a queer playwright whose stories were shaped by an era when so much could not safely be said aloud.

That perspective is particularly powerful in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. At the center of the play are Brick and Maggie, a marriage fractured by grief, resentment, desire, and silence. As the Pollitt family gathers at their Mississippi estate, questions of inheritance and legacy collide with sexuality, masculinity, repression, and the carefully constructed lies people tell in order to survive.

Under Mixon’s direction, the queerness at the heart of Brick’s story—and his relationship with Skipper—is not relegated to the margins. Instead, this production examines what Williams was able to put on the page, what his time and circumstances forced into subtext, and what contemporary queer artists and audiences can recognize more openly today.

For Mixon, directing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also represents a remarkable full-circle moment: an artist whose education was made possible, in part, through funding bearing Tennessee Williams’ name now brings their own education, lived experience, and queer perspective to one of his most enduring works.

Sultry, intimate, volatile, and deeply human, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof asks what happens when a family builds its life around things that cannot be spoken—and what it costs to finally tell the truth.

This production also continues Seed Theatre’s commitment to powerful storytelling that refuses to look away from difficult truths. Throughout their season, they choose stories that ask audiences to wrestle with identity, power, belonging, family, injustice, and the complicated ways people fight to be fully themselves.

Whether through contemporary queer voices or a classic work viewed through a new lens, Seed believes theatre is at its most powerful when it does more than entertain—it gives us language for the things we have been taught not to say, makes space for stories pushed to the margins, and invites us to see one another more fully.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof