In March 2024, Ruth Stage took its groundbreaking Off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof beyond New York City for a landmark one-night engagement at the 38th Annual Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Invited to showcase its acclaimed production, Ruth Stage was summoned to New Orleans as the featured theatrical event of the festival’s Saturday evening program, bringing its uncompromising vision of Williams’ American masterpiece to the historic Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Monteleone.

On March 23, 2024, Matt de Rogatis, whose incendiary portrayal of Brick had anchored 76 performances Off-Broadway, and the production’s original Big Daddy, three-time Emmy Award winner Christian Jules LeBlanc, reunited to perform the explosive second act of the play before a sold-out ballroom of more than 200 attendees. The performance culminated in a standing ovation, followed by a talkback led by renowned Tennessee Williams scholar David Kaplan, engaging theatergoers and students in a deeper examination of Williams’ work and its enduring psychological power.

The engagement marked a pivotal moment in Ruth Stage’s evolution: the first major step in extending its artistic reach beyond New York and toward a national stage. What began as a daring Off-Broadway reimagining was now traveling to one of the most storied cities in American literary history. This was an early declaration of Ruth Stage’s ambition to bring its psychologically charged, uncompromising theater to audiences across the country.