Anika Noni Rose

It’s amazing that choreographer Debbie Allen’s starry Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the first all-black version—can have so much plain wrong with it, yet still delight me. But consider this: No great playwright ever wrote so badly and so beautifully within the same play as Tennessee Williams (unless it was Eugene O’Neill).

I love Williams in spite of his flaws and because of them. He’s our poet of tender mercies who put onstage the large, damaged hearts of the dispossessed.  read more »