The burning question of the relationship between terrorism and the media, current in 1985 when Mastrosimone first presented the play, and still urgent today, motivated JOPPs Artistic Director Joe Orrach and stage Director Darcy Marta to chose Cats Paw, a work with a relatively small cast (4 players) to launch this series of plays at JOPPs 4th Street studio.  Cats Paw involves dual concerns of ecological disintegration (water pollution through willful government neglect) and manipulation of citizens through the media. It is a drama of personalities bound together by an unusual terrorist; brilliant, articulate, and obsessed with the degradation of the world's water supply and, with it, the final destruction of the human race.  

Reflecting on why he wrote this piece, William Mastrosimone stated: "The terrorist thinks and acts in symbols, and the media appreciates the economy of image. Terrorism and media share a capacity to inflate or flatten people. On the television screen, the fruit-fly is magnified into an eagle; the mindless thing becomes a martyr; the crime becomes a myth. And so the collaboration goes."