Three Plays by Tennessee Williams

[stubbornly evasive] : Believing....
     
    BIG DADDY : I don't know what the hell you mean by believing and I don't think you know what you mean by believing, but if you still got sports in your blood, go back to sports announcing and—
     
    BRICK : Sit in a glass box watching games I can't play? Describing what I can't do while players do it? Sweating out their disgust and confusion in contests I'm not fit for? Drinkin' a coke, half bourbon, so I can stand it? That's no goddam good any more, no help—time just outran me, Big Daddy—got there first...
     
    BIG DADDY : I think you're passing the buck.
     
    BRICK : You know many drinkin' men?
     
    BIG DADDY [with a slight, charming smile] : I have known a fair number of that species.
     
    BRICK : Could any of them tell you why he drank?
     
    BIG DADDY : Yep, you're passin' the buck to things like time and disgust with 'mendacity' and—crap!—if you got to use that kind of language about a thing, it's ninety-proof bull, and I'm not buying any.
     
    BRICK : I had to give you a reason to get a drink!
     
    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 : Now