P.S. Your Cat Is Dead

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Poster for the 2002 film

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead is a novel, a play and a movie written by James Kirkwood, Jr., a gay playwright who also penned A Chorus Line.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

1 1970 novel & play
2 Mexican play
3 2002 film
4 External links

[edit] 1970 novel & play

Originally written as a novel then a play in 1970, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead deals with a hapless writer, "Jimmy Zoole", who is left by his girlfriend on New Year's Eve. Unbeknownst to him, his cat has also died in an animal clinic.

To make matters worse, he surprises a burglar, Vito, in his apartment, who it turns out had broken in a few times before, stealing among other things Zoole's precious manuscripts.

Wanting to teach the burglar a lesson, Zoole ties him up to his kitchen table, initially torturing him by having him eat extra-spicy cat food and the likes.

But soon their relationship begins to take on a homosexual dimension, when Vito tells him he is gay and Zoole interviews him about his love life, supposedly "to get material for a novel".

Zoole, who was previously shown as being in mourning for a male friend (similar to Brick Pollitt in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; fittingly Zoole's cat is named "Tennessee"), suddenly begins to question his own sexuality.

He even gets a hilarious revenge on his former girlfriend, when she shows up in his apartment with her date, only to find him chatting with a young, attractive, bare-butted male tied to his sink.

Eventually, Zoole and Vito come to terms with each other and the last scene hints at a deep friendship, if not perhaps relationship, of the two.

With daring themes of homosexuality, bisexuality, and BDSM, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead long remained an obscure cult classic.

[edit] Mexican play

In Mexico, this play was first produced in 1983 and starred by Manuel Ojeda as Jimmy and Humberto Zurita as Eddie. It was also produced from 1997 to 2000 and starred by Otto Sirgo in the role of Jimmy. The role of Eddie throughout the years went to Héctor Soberón, Juan Soler, Xavier Ortiz and Héctor Suarez Gomiz The play was also presented in several cities of the United States when Juan Soler was part of the cast.

[edit] 2002 film

In 2002, Steve Guttenberg (better known for the Police Academy movies) combined the play and the novel into a movie, which he co-wrote and directed, starring himself as the writer, Cynthia Watros as his newly-ex-girlfriend Kate and Lombardo Boyar as the youthful burglar (here named Eddie, as in many later productions).