BIG DADDY: You started drinkin’ when your friend Skipper died. [Silence for five beats. Then Brick makes a startled movement, reaching for his crutch.]
BRICK: What are you suggesting?
BIG DADDY: I’m suggesting nothing. [The shuffle and clop of Brick’s rapid hobble away from his father’s steady, grave attention.] –But Gooper an’ Mae suggested that there was something not right exactly in your—
BRICK [stopping short downstage as if backed to a wall]: ‘Not right’?
BIG DADDY: Not, well, exactly normal in your friendship with—
BRICK: They suggested that, too? I thought that was Maggie’s suggestion. [Brick’s detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they’re discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick’s side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to ‘keep face’ in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the ‘mendacity’ that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s psychological problem. I’m trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent–fiercely charged!–interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can–but it should steer him away from ‘pat’ conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. | The following scene should be played with great concentration, with most of the power leashed but palpable in what is left unspoken.] Who else’s suggestion is it, is it yours? How many others thought that Skipper and I were—
BIG DADDY [gently]: Now, hold on, hold on a minute, son.–I knocked around in my time.
BRICK: What’s that got to do with—
BIG DADDY: I said ‘Hold on!’–I bummed, I bummed this country till I was—
BRICK: Whose suggestion, who else’s suggestion is it?
BIG DADDY: Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y’s and flophouses in all cities before I- –
BRICK: Oh, you think so, too, you call me your son and a queer. Oh!! Maybe that’s why you put Maggie and me in this room that was Jack Straw’s and Peter Ochello’s, in which that pair of old sisters slept in a double bed where both of ’em died!
BIG DADDY [leaving a lot unspoken]: –I seen all things and understood a lot of them, till 1910. Christ, the year that–I had worn my shoes through, hocked my–I hopped off a yellow dog freight car half a mile down the road, slept in a wagon of cotton outside the gin–Jack Straw an’ Peter Ochello took me in. Hired me to manage this place which grew into this one.–When Jack Straw died–why, old Peter Ochello quit eatin’ like a dog does when its master’s dead, and died, too!
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!
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….
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