Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana

A tale with staying power, The Night of the Iguana began as a 1948 short story growing into a one and then a three act play. Most who are familiar remember the 1964 Richard Burton/Ava Gardner film.

1940. Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly in the Burton role), locked out of his Virginia church for statutory rape and sacrilegious sermons – he characterized God as a “senile delinquent” –  turned to leading bus tours, after ostensibly drying out. Having worked his way down in status, he’s currently in Mexico with a gaggle of school teachers from a Baptist college.

An inebriated night with 17 year-old passenger Charlotte Goodall (Carmen Berkeley – grabby, not seductive; singsong voice) has already ruined whatever authority he had. It also stoked hostility of the young woman’s “keeper” Judith Fellowes (Lea Delaria – a demonstrative Rosie O’Donnell look-alike) who’s determined to get him fired. After three blowouts, a leaky radiator, and torrents of rain, not to mention the cacophony of group singing, he’s at his wit’s end.

Daphne Rubin-Vega (Maxine), Tim Daly (Shannon)

Shannon knows the area well. He stops the bus at the foot of a hill leading to the hotel/home of dear friends Maxine (Daphne Rubin-Vega in no way up to the Gardner role) and Fred Faulk. An earthy, cynical, practical woman who says what she thinks, the proprietress and he had been lovers. Fred recently died. Two attractive, young boys (Bradley James Tejeda and Dan Teixeura) now meet her sexual needs and petulantly carry luggage.

It’s 100 degrees in the shade. The protagonist is feverish/soaked, unshaven, untucked. Pocketing the bus keys, he’s determined to remain at least three days. There are arguments. The widow looks at Shannon like a ripe fruit. She knows his spiritually broken history, but desperate for peer company (and some kind of future) tries to convince him to send the tour on and stay.

Into this ferment comes middle-aged spinster Hannah Jelkes (Jean Lichty), pushing “Nonno,” her 97 year-old grandfather Jonathan Coffin (Austin Pendleton), up the hill in a wheelchair. Coffin was a famous poet. The patrician pair travel together, he reciting, she selling watercolors and creating caricatures in exchange for their keep. They’re proud and broke. Hotels in town turned them away. Maxine wants to follow suit, but Shannon steps in.

Jean Lichty (Hannah Jelkes), Austin Pendleton (Nonno)

Also guests on the hill, seemingly as if in another play, are two cliché German tourists Frau Farenkopf (Alena Acker) and her husband (Michael Leigh Cook) literally cheering Hitler with every radio news broadcast. Are they included to emphasize the isolation of Maxine’s place? To show the blind obeisance of followers? The Baptists are staying in an annex we never see.

At first under the illusion the church might take him back, Shannon then loses his cracked axis and falls apart. He’s most grounded and sensitive when talking to Nonno, with whom he’s solicitous and the intriguing Miss Jelkes, who has surprising reason to understand his particular hell. Time with these characters is some of Williams’ best writing and best acting here. The playwright doesn’t take an easy way out by coupling them. Resolutions (those we glean) range from unhappy to grim.

Tim Daly (Shannon), Jean Lichty (Hannah Jelkes)

In 1969, alcoholic, medicated, 60 year-old Tennessee Williams was received “reborn” into the Catholic Church. America Magazine quoted him as having said perhaps baptism would help him get his goodness back. According to the attending priest, Williams’ was the shortest confession he had ever heard. “I have always loved the richness of the Catholic ritual, the aroma of the incense, the splendor of the art…but the tenets of the church are ridiculous.” (Williams) Shades of Shannon. Recovery and redemption run through the playwright’s works like vertebrae.

The piece is long and seems longer. There’s terrific writing, but some of the cast is unable to rise to the occasion. At this performance, Tim Daly forgets too many lines shaking his concentration. He does, however, if intermittently, convince us of Shannon’s fragility, agony, and the “Spook” just out of sight. Daly also shows glimpses of nature that might’ve made Shannon a good priest.

Austin Pendleton is elegant and sweetly confused. Recitation of “the” poem is marvelous. Nonno fits him like a bespoke suit.

To my mind, the find here is Jean Lichty (Miss Jelkes). From the moment the actress enters, she IS her character. Every move and gesture, every pause and glance reflect the whole person. Hannah appears timorous, but has a steel backbone. Lichty is entirely believable.

Director Emily Mann has an aesthetic as well as dramatic sense of staging. Pacing is excellent. The manner in which Shannon is tied into his hammock is perfect. That Rubin-Vega embodies neither the sensual appetite nor life experience of Maxine is an issue. The Germans are cartoons.

Beowulf Boritt’s set is geographically evocative and credibly worn. By keeping three guest room doors freestanding, letting the air in, he allows dramatic dialogue to flow rather than emerge weighted down before a solid box. Both the hammock and Nonno’s wheelchair are specific and splendid.

Jennifer Von Mayrhauser’s costumes further define each character.

The Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon was based partly on Williams’ cousin and close friend, the Reverend Sidney Lanier, the iconoclastic rector of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, New York. Lanier was a significant figure in the New York theater scene in the 1950s and 1960s, started a Ministry to the Theatre Arts, and became co-founder of the experimental American Place Theatre in 1962. (Wikipedia)

Photos by Joan Marcus
Opening: Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jean Lichty, Tim Daly, Austin Pendleton, Alena Acker and Michael Leigh Cook

La Femme Theatre Productions presents
Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana
Directed by Emily Mann
Pershing Square Signature Center
480 W 42nd Street