Not to get too personal about it, or maybe to get far too personal about it: The La Femme Theatre revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana offered me a double whammy.
Let me explain: I have a theory that good playwrights deliver one truly outstanding play, very good playwrights deliver two, and exceptional playwrights deliver three or maybe even more. I credit Williams with four: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana.
Acknowledging these are very much my opinions — criticism being no more than informed opinion, a fact too often forgotten — I further maintain that while I revere the first three right up there with the reverence of other professional opinion holders, my favorite is – excuse the mundane choice of “favorite” — The Night of the Iguana.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
I suspect my response most likely is with its protagonist, T. Lawrence Shannon. This man who’s been excused from the Church for bad behavior but insists he hasn’t been defrocked, is unlike the focal figures in the other Williams works. Those are women, often claimed to be Williams’ versions of himself.
This man is clearly a version of Williams as he was in 1959, when he was writing the play, breaking up with longtime lover Frank Merlo, and facing problems with longtime agent Audrey Wood. Shannon, sensing himself at the end of his rope, also declares he’s at the end of his rope — as is the symbolic titular iguana literally stated to be towards blackout.
Which brings me to my first unexpected, definitely unsolicited whammy: the new production. Williams once told an interviewer about The Night of the Iguana (and perhaps said as much elsewhere) that he considered it “more of a dramatic poem than a play.” And here’s where this backward glance doesn’t measure up, as directed with little indication of the poetic by Emily Mann.
Aside from one late sequence, it’s unrelievedly prosaic. On designer Beowulf Boritt’s veranda for a run-down Costa Verde, Mexico hotel, Shannon (Tim Daly) arrives as tour guide for a group of (never seen) middle-aged women. They’re led by tough-as-nails Miss Judith Fellowes (Lea DeLaria, in top tough-as-nails form), who wants Shannon dismissed.
Shannon, greeted by hotel owner Maxine Faulks (Daphne Rubin-Vega, down-to-earth but maybe not sufficiently more), whose husband has recently died, declares he needs a rest. Aside from being at the end of his rope, he’s suffering from a high temperature.
But — and this is a significant but — as Daly enacts the role, you’d never know it. Does he appear to be a completely exhausted and defeated man as he grapples with Maxine, now often and casually indulging herself with lazy, strapping staff helpers Pedro (Bradley James Tejeda) and Pancho (Dan Teixeira)? Does he appear to be spiritually bereft when fighting off teenage Charlotte Goodall (Carmen Berkeley, loud and grasping), with whom he’s been dallying because he can’t help his relentless, misguided urges. During all these tugs of relationship wars, the worst he seems is unceasingly argumentative.
Most importantly, does his unnegotiable depression reverberate when he becomes emotionally entangled with Hannah Jelkes (La Femme founder-director Jean Lichty). (Hannah is woman’s mind, Maxine represents body.) Painting watercolors of other tourists, she supports herself and her meaningfully named 97-year-old poet grandfather, Jonathan Coffin, also called Nonno (Austin Pendleton).
Only in the late sequence when Shannon is tied on a hammock (is this a visual pun on a man’s being at the end of his rope?) while Hannah and he are challenging each other on life’s intricacies does Williams’ dialogue levitate poetically. During the colloquy, Lichty gets to say, and say well, Williams’ memorably heart-rending line, “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent.”
There is another unmistakable poetic moment: Nonno finally recites the poem over which he’s been deliberating for years. Stage vet Pendleton is, of course, up to the task. Perhaps needless to say, Williams is up to creating the stunner.
But if Mann’s barely mediocre take on The Night of the Iguana is the immediate whammy, the second may bother me more: Williams’ script. As mentioned above and as might be expected, my regard for it had been based on Williams’ 1961 opening night script.
That’s changed. Although I’ve seen the drama on stage several times, I haven’t seen it there since I996. In the meantime, I’ve watched the 1964 film many times. It’s on that version, starring Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, and Ava Gardner, that I realize I base my devotion.
And guess what. The script I now prize deviates from 1961’s presentation and credits as writers not only Williams but director John Huston and Anthony Veiller (the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, among his notable movies). Williams was on hand for the filming – as documents of the film’s shooting attest. Therefore, he was obviously involved with the adaptation, but probably Huston had the last word.
Shortened and much tweaked, it eliminates, for instance, Nazi enthusiasts Herr Fahrenkopf and Frau Fahrenkopf, played broadly on stage now by Michael Leigh Cook and Alena Acker. Many other redactions crop up to tighten Williams’ solo work. Able to open up the setting, Huston occasionally leaves the veranda for ogling Gardner’s water frolicking with Pedro and Pancho, no visual letdown. Oh, well, that’s how the collaborative arts sometimes go.
The Night of the Iguana opened December 17, 2023, at Signature Center and runs through February 25, 2024. Tickets and information: iguanaplaynyc.com
