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Four Humours first appeared with a lauded production of Kennedy's Children...a barroom drama performed in a bar...and last appeared with a lauded production of Krapp's Last Tape...a backroom monologue performed in a back room. We're at it again, taking Tennessee Williams' last major play, THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and moving it...well, not quite all the way to a hillside in Mexico, but definitely outdoors. To the actual backyard of the Backyard Ballroom.
As the October sun sets in real life, so does the sun set in the play.
The play begins when the former Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, reduced ...Read More
Four Humours first appeared with a lauded production of Kennedy's Children...a barroom drama performed in a bar...and last appeared with a lauded production of Krapp's Last Tape...a backroom monologue performed in a back room. We're at it again, taking Tennessee Williams' last major play, THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and moving it...well, not quite all the way to a hillside in Mexico, but definitely outdoors. To the actual backyard of the Backyard Ballroom.
As the October sun sets in real life, so does the sun set in the play.
The play begins when the former Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, reduced to driving tour buses since being defrocked for intimacy with young girls, snaps one afternoon n ear the coast of Mexico, pulls over to the side of the road, and abandons his tourists to seek rest and recuperation with his old friends Maxine and Fred Faulk, the proprietors of a shabby hotel. But old Fred is recently deceased, and practical Maxine sets her cap for the feverish, near-to-breakdown Shannon the moment she lays eyes on him. The situation is made more fraught by the arrival of wandering artist Hannah Jelkes, her decrepit grandfather in tow; the serene young woman seems to embody the grace and spirituality that Shannon has striven for all of his life, and needs to reclaim now more than ever. The women will compete for Shannon's destiny, one of them unwillingly.
Charlotte, Shannon's last young lover, has a claim on him as well, whether her protector Miss Fellowes approves or not.
Long considered to be the most problematic of Williams' great works, IGUANA has difficult changes in tone: at times as elegiac as "The Glass Menagerie," at times as garish as "Suddenly Last Summer" and at times--especially in its famous concluding dark-night-of-the-soul dialogue between the disgraced Reverend Shannon and the mysterious Hannah Jelkes--as profound and painful as any confrontation in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." All of this is surrounded by broad swathes of comedy, especially when provided by Maxine Faulk. Iguana also boasts, practically unprecedented for Williams, a happy ending. Happy enough, at least.
We treat the core triangle with tenderness, but wrap it round with as much as Carnivalesque, anything-goes comedy as possible... without, he hopes, violating the script. Thus Pedro and Pancho, Maxine's young employees, are given more to do than service her and shake their maracas. Thus the boisterous family of German tourists--usually cut--stay explosively in the action, and the action overall stays in the early 1940s. And thus does Shannon's abandoned gaggle of Baptist College teacher-tourists appear onstage, doing their damnedest to have a little fun. Behaving just like we know tourists are prone to behave.
Maxine's place encompasses the entire space, so everybody who attends this limited-run, by-donation production of The Night of the Iguana is a guest at her little hotel. Backyard Ballroom will offer bar service throughout, and Four Humours will bring the buffet.
The iguana--lizards in general, a little research reveals--usually represents a turning toward the sun, toward enlightenment. This may be the night of the iguana, but it is facing a new day.
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