Dramaworks’ opening season traditionally begins with a
challenging masterwork, with a full scale cast, and The Night of the Iguana, perhaps Tennessee Williams’ greatest play,
is no exception. This is their first Tennessee Williams play,
something director Bill Hayes felt the company could not do until they were
ready. Opening night occurred after one
preview performance (delays in rehearsals courtesy of Hurricane Matthew), conceivably
an obstacle in making this a totally flawless production.
Under the allegorical canopy of a tropical sky The Night of the Iguana unfolds as two
improbable “kinsmen met a night” – the defrocked Reverend Lawrence Shannon and
the persevering artist Hannah Jelkes. Williams’
setting is an unforgiving universe where survival and endurance are requisite attributes.
As an epigram to the play, Williams quotes the last four
lines of an Emily Dickinson poem, “I Died for Beauty.” Shannon and Jelkes are indeed “brethren” in
that they are out of place with the rest of the world on the Mexican coast at The
Costa Verde Hotel in 1940 – an actual hotel where Williams himself stayed during
that time, loosely basing the play on his own personal experience.
I quote the entire poem as it has relevancy in my opinion:
I died for beauty,
but was scarce
Adjusted in the
tomb,
When one who died
for truth was lain
In an adjoining
room.
He questioned
softly why I failed?
"For
beauty," I replied.
"And I for
truth, -the two are one;
We brethren
are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met
a night,
We talked between
the rooms,
Until the moss had
reached our lips,
And covered up our
names.
The play is heavily constructed around symbolism and metaphor,
the most obvious being a captured Iguana which is tied at the end of a rope
awaiting slaughter. It represents the
human condition. Shannon exclaims that he is
going to go down there with a machete and cut the damn lizard loose so it can
run back to the bushes because God won’t do it and we are going to play God
today. The very difficult role of Rev. Shannon is played by Tim
Altmeyer who endeavors to express the anguish of this tortured character, but
at times he makes Shannon appear more pathetic than desperate. Unfortunately, not all of Altmeyer’s dialogue
could be easily heard (or understood) and therefore some of Williams’ brilliant
language was lost on the audience.
Although Shannon is “a man of the cloth,” Hannah’s own theology
(her philosophy of living) gives her the power of redemption, Shannon admitting
to her that he arrived, at this place in time, his voice choking, to meet someone who wants to help me, Miss
Jelkes. Williams’ stage direction
describes Hannah as “remarkable looking – ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a
medieval saint, but animated. She could
be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking
– almost timeless.” Katie Cunningham masters
the mysterious Hannah, capturing her delicacy on the one hand, and her steely
strength on the other. Her performance
is almost certainly what Williams had in mind when he originally wrote the part
for Katharine Hepburn (who was unavailable at the time the play was staged).
Jelkes has traveled to Mexico with her 98 year old
Grandfather, Nonno. He is a “minor” poet
who hasn’t written anything in decades, but is now working on what will be his
last poem. Hannah and Nonno, in spite of
their obvious education and Nantucket upbringing, are now reduced to a
peripatetic life of “depending on the kindness of strangers” to borrow from
another Tennessee Williams play, Hannah doing quick artistic sketches and Nonno
reciting some of his poems for money and room and board. Dennis Creaghan, the seasoned professional,
his ninth time on stage at Dramaworks, plays Nonno, deftly mines his character’s
aging angst trying to finish his first poem in 20 years.
A group of German tourists are also guests at the
hotel. As it is the summer of 1940, they are closely
following the Battle of Britain on the radio.
Their demonic, bacchanalian behavior – and their sense of arrogance,
knowing that they are “right”-- is juxtaposed to the inner struggles of Hannah
and Shannon to find themselves.
If Hannah is a Freudian superego, the other key female
character, Maxine, is clearly the id. She
is sultrily played by another Dramaworks veteran, Kim Cozort Kay. Maxine was married to Fred, Shannon’s friend,
a Hemingwayesque character who, unknown to Shannon, had just recently died. Shannon detoured his tour group-- women from
a Texas Baptist college -- to the Costa
Verde Hotel in a last ditch effort to salvage his job with the third-rate Blake
Tours, hoping that Fred would be able to rescue him.
The woman who engaged Blake Tours for the Mexican tour,
Judith Fellowes, is enraged by misrepresentations made of the tour and by
Shannon’s one night sexual encounter with the youngest woman in the group, the
16 year old Charlotte Goodall, played by Alexandra Grunberg making her
Dramaworks debut. Fellowes is a one-dimensional character
(always angry) but a catalyst, off stage and on, for moving the action; she is
played by long time south Florida actor, Irene Adjan.
With Fred deceased, Shannon is now desperately dependent
on Maxine as she is on him. Prior to his
unexpected arrival, she was a lonely widow being “serviced” by two young Mexican
boys, her only source of intimate human contact after years of a celibate
marriage. She needs Shannon, but he is
on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He
has suffered these episodes before (“the spook” as he refers to it), a
condition Maxine is very familiar with.
Williams masterfully brings all of these themes together
probing Hannah and Shannon’s relationship and their recognition that they are
both damaged creatures, at the end of their ropes. Ultimately Shannon has to be restrained in a
hammock, much the same way as the Iguana is tied, while he is pursued by “the
spook.” Hannah rescues him as he ultimately rescues
the Iguana. She observes while he is
tied up: Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the
world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill
that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr.
Shannon? There’s something almost
voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock – no nails, no blood,
no death. Isn’t that a comparatively
comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of
the world, Mr. Shannon?
The play culminates in Nonno’s completion of his poem,
one that embodies Williams’ themes, man’s relationship to nature, to God, to
death and to a new kind of love that transcends “the earth's obscene corrupting
love.” Full circle back to Emily
Dickinson’s virtuous love of beauty and truth, the two main characters’
“failures” (“he whispered softly for what I failed”) being an intimate
knowledge of one another, a kind of uncorrupted understanding. It is Williams’ most hopeful play, or, as he
put it “how to live with dignity after despair.”
Executing this play is complicated. Hayes strives to walk that fine line of being
trapped in symbolism and the melodramatic, so typical of the theatre in the
early 1960s, seeking to attain a sense of heightened realism. His assistant director is Paula D'Alessandris. Hayes is skillfully supported by the
incredibly talented Dramaworks technicians.
Scenic design by Michael Amico craftily captures the
theatrical realism of a hotel in decay, the encroaching active jungle, alive
with danger, and the symbolic isolation of the separate rooms on the verandah
(I think of the tombs in Dickinson’s poem).
Paul Black’s lighting design works in harmony with the set, characterizing
a wide range of lighting challenges, late afternoon sun, sunset, a long night, and
a severe storm.
Matt Corey’s sound design serves up that storm, echoes
from the hills, and appropriate guitar interludes, all in sync with the
production. Brian O'Keefe, PBD resident
costume designer creatively captures the era and the sweltering heat, as well
as Hannah’s stealthy delicacy, as if she is indeed otherworldly.
Other members of the large cast are David Nail, Michael
Collins, Brian Varela, Thomas Rivera, David Hyland, Becca McCoy, Rebecca
Tucker, and Jordon Armstrong.
Dramaworks’ The
Night of the Iguana is an ambitious production by one of America’s greatest
playwrights.
