The Night of the Iguana serves up some Tennessee Williams specialties: aging sex symbols, undeniably attractive men, intriguing women and their relationships. Add to this some metaphysics, and the feverish atmosphere of his familiar hot climes, and the drama proceeds inevitably from there. Produced by the theatre department of Mount Holyoke College, it was performed this past weekend at the school’s intimate Rooke Theatre.
Iguana takes place in a basically ambiguous location, somewhere along the west coast of Mexico. The setting is the Costa Verde, a hilltop hotel in its off season. Surrounded by a lush rainforest background, it is populated only by its recently widowed owner, Maxine, and the two Mexican youths she has taken in as employees and a sort of family. She is soon joined by her friend and occasional lover, the Reverend Shannon.
Shannon is the tour guide for a busload of choirgirls, and their “butch” director, on a trip around the sights of Mexico. Hot, sick, and in some serious trouble with his higher-ups for sleeping with one of the girls, Shannon orders the bus stop at the Costa Verde. This is familiar territory for him, somewhere he can go to get some rest, or alternately, a peaceful place to have his recurring nervous breakdowns.
Soon after Shannon’s arrival, a woman named Hannah and her grandfather appear on the scene. They make their living, as they travel around the world, by selling Hannah’s artwork and collecting money for her grandfather’s poetry recitations. They seem to make barely enough to stay alive, and pay for their room and board with their talents. Maxine won’t tolerate this, as an extremely pragmatic woman who is perpetually concerned with her financial security. But, she bends to Shannon’s will when he asks that they be allowed to stay.
The Reverend is an aging womanizer, whose age doesn’t seem likely to stop him, or to stop women from being attracted to him. A Lolita-like choirgirl, at the tender age of 16, has fallen hard for him. Maxine had fallen for him years ago, and Hannah is soon to follow suit. Maxine, a woman interested in earthly things, loves him for his sex appeal, and for a possible future husband. But Hannah is a saintly and virginal woman. Shannon has too much respect for her to even make his unfailing move. Over the course of the day, Hannah and Shannon become close. They are both a kind of hustler, they discover. She, selling her artwork to survive and he, selling his man-of-the-cloth image to those interested in religious tours. Maxine, who is supposed to be a strong and fierce woman, is determined to keep Shannon around. It is only the enchanting Hannah who can throw a wrench into the hostess’ machinations.
Iguana was published in 1961, a good number of years separating this and Williams’ most famous plays and major successes, including The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). It is a mature work, and director Joyce Devlin would have done well to let the maturity and reflective quality of the piece stand alone. Instead, this production continually insults its audience’s intelligence.
The directorial choices Devlin made were completely without subtlety. For most of the important scenes, stand-ins for Maxine, Hannah and Shannon did a sort of pantomime/dance between the back of the set and in front of the jungle backdrop. For instance, the “real” Shannon and Hannah would have a conversation, in which they were alternately being drawn to each other, physically and emotionally. Meanwhile, the pantomime/dancer versions of each character, would be in the obscured and elevated set piece, pulling a piece of rope back and forth between them, showing with exaggerated movements that the foreground conversation was drawing them together. The dancers continued in this way, sometimes mimicking the actors’ movements, sometimes representing their thoughts or feelings, throughout the whole of the play.
Devlin’s direction, while being utterly condescending to the audience, also undercut the actors’ ability to do their work. For some reason, Devlin had some of the actors break the fourth wall in their respective entrances, making a movement that let us know who they were and what they were about (the Lolita choirgirl did a little seductive dance) instead of letting us glean it from Williams’ clear and powerful script.
Shawn Dempewolf-Barrett as Shannon had some shining moments. Though both his anger and nervous breakdown came precipitously and without the necessary foreshadowing, his honesty with Hannah was touching. His best moments came when he, almost in a trance, described his relationship with God. His God is a Romantic one, full of both kindness and fury, pervading every part of nature and man, and especially present in the seedy underbelly of the cities that he tours, and perfectly embodied in the thunder storm. But he never really seems tortured by what he calls his “spook,” which might be his past, his mental instability, his alcoholism, or a combination of all three.
Hannah Knapp as Hannah was appropriately saintly, with just a hint of mischief and seduction about her. Knapp held many of the scenes together with her cool confidence. However, her decision to keep Hannah as such a cold woman made it difficult to see Shannon’s attraction to her in any other light except that she was the opposite of Maxine.
Maxine is a typical Williams’ aging sex symbol. Like Maggie of Cat, she is desperate to hold on to her sexual prowess, with which she has won her man before. Maxine is a powerful woman, which Malone got across to us by using her formidable vocal strength and not her acting ability. Perhaps it takes a more mature actress for an inherent understanding of the position of the aging woman.
The set design was just about as obvious as the directing choices. Maxine isn’t in dire financial straights, and her hotel is out of season, and not run down. Set designer Malea L. Jochim, though making a visually beautiful set, should have made it less dilapidated. The costumes too were mostly first-rate, but often too obvious. Charlotte (the Lolita) was garbed in a bikini top and almost invisible denim cut-offs. If she were really in a religious choir, she clearly would not be wearing this. Her acting should have accounted for Shannon’s attraction to her, and not her skimpy clothes.
Devlin’s neat tie-up at the end, allowing the literally personified iguana to shed its costume and dance, after it is set free, was unnecessary, verging on absurd. Williams’ plays are already packed symbolism. All in all, the acting was competent. It’s unfortunate that Devlin didn’t think so. Had she let the play and the actors go unhindered by the condescending tone, Iguana would have been much more successful.
