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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Notes for the Designer

This Pulitzer Prize-winning play dramatizes a single evening in the life of the Pollitts, a fractured Mississippi family.

Here are links to our lists for the play: Notes for the Designer, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3
10 words 463 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

  1. plantation
    an estate where cash crops are grown on a large scale
    The set is the bed-sitting-room of a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta.
  2. gallery
    narrow balcony area along an upper floor of a building
    It is along an upstairs gallery which probably runs around the entire house; it has two pairs of very wide doors opening onto the gallery, showing white balustrades against a fair summer sky that fades into dusk and night during the course of the play, which occupies precisely the time of its performance, excepting, of course, the fifteen minutes of intermission.
  3. evoke
    call forth, as an emotion, feeling, or response
    In other words, the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon.
  4. extremity
    a condition or state beyond the norm
    For the set is the background for a play that deals with human extremities of emotion, and it needs that softness behind it.
  5. monstrosity
    something hideous or frightful
    ...against the wall space between the two huge double doors upstage: a monumental monstrosity peculiar to our times, a huge console combination of radio-phonograph (hi-fi with three speakers) TV set and liquor cabinet, bearing and containing many glasses and bottles, all in one piece...
  6. composition
    something created by arranging things to form a whole
    ...which is a composition of muted silver tones, and the opalescent tones of reflecting glass, a chromatic link, this thing, between the sepia (tawny gold) tones of the interior and the cool (white and blue) tones of the gallery and sky.
  7. opalescent
    having a play of lustrous rainbow colors
    ...which is a composition of muted silver tones, and the opalescent tones of reflecting glass, a chromatic link, this thing, between the sepia (tawny gold) tones of the interior and the cool (white and blue) tones of the gallery and sky.
  8. tawny
    having the color of tanned leather
    ...which is a composition of muted silver tones, and the opalescent tones of reflecting glass, a chromatic link, this thing, between the sepia (tawny gold) tones of the interior and the cool (white and blue) tones of the gallery and sky.
  9. pallor
    an unnatural lack of color in the skin
    I think the walls below the ceiling should dissolve mysteriously into air; the set should be roofed by the sky; stars and moon suggested by traces of milky pallor, as if they were observed through a telescope lens out of focus.
  10. amber
    a deep yellow color
    Oh, yes, fanlights (transoms shaped like an open glass fan) above all the doors in the set, with panes of blue and amber, and above all, the designer should take as many pains to give the actors room to move about freely (to show their restlessness, their passion for breaking out) as if it were a set for a ballet.
Created on Fri Nov 15 14:55:57 EST 2019 (updated Tue Jul 29 09:38:56 EDT 2025)

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