Tennessee Williams precedes the published version of “The Night of the Iguana” with four lines by Emily Dickinson:
“And so, as kinsmen met at night/ We talked between the rooms/ Until the moss had reached our lips/ And covered up our names.”
Rarely has a preamble cut so sharply to the heart of a work of art. Make that a great work of art. It has been a kind of rehearsal thesis for director Robert Falls and his ambitious revival now at the Goodman Theatre that “Iguana” may be Williams’ finest achievement. Never dismissed, “Iguana” always rested somewhere in the middle, between the towering accomplishments-“The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”-and Williams’ latter-day embarrassments, somewhere on the shelf with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Sweet Bird of Youth.”
Falls’ revival is ingeniously timed to question the drama’s middling status, coming when overfamiliarity leaves both “Menagerie” and “Streetcar” in cultural holding patterns, and when the memories of so many bad nights of the “Iguana” at amateur theaters everywhere have receded. There’s even a textual restoration here. Falls includes key elements of the drama’s most important scene; they had been trimmed from the 1961 Broadway premiere partly to assuage the ego of Bette Davis, who felt the lines heightened parts played by two other actors.
So what makes “Iguana” so special? As suggested in the Dickinson opening, the play is all about a rare moment of communication, of “broken gates,” as Williams calls them, between two people “at the end of their rope” and nearly going mad because of it. One of them, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, is a disgraced minister with a taste for underage girls, now forced to conduct shabby bus tours throughout the backwater Mexico of the play’s hotel setting. His is a literal breakdown, an exhibition of raging anger, frustration and defeat so violent that it forces the hotel’s proprietor, Maxine, to shackle him to a hammock to stop him from harming himself or others.
His counselor in this dark night of the soul is just as desperate, though more gently so. Hannah, another hotel guest, talks of her past nervous breakdowns as a way of mustering empathy with Shannon, but she’s in the middle of a life-changing crisis on the evening in question, too: Her elderly grandfather, the world’s “oldest living poet,” could well be in his final days, and his death will leave her without a companion and, to some extent, purposeless. She has devoted her life to traveling the world with the gentleman, selling watercolors and sketches while he recites.
Hannah and Shannon talk about two elemental forces of human experience: carnality, which energizes much of Williams’ writing elsewhere, and spirituality, the pursuit of godliness on a tainted Earth, a topic all but absent from the rest of the playwright’s endeavors. Those themes, and a lot else, make “Iguana” Williams’ “Hamlet” and “King Lear” in one. As Falls notes, “Iguana,” unlike “The Glass Menagerie” or “Streetcar,” is Shakespearean, a play whose most memorable onstage event is a tumultuous tropical storm as tempestuous and as symbolic as Lear’s night on the heath.
The drama also contains a catalog of Western dialectical opposites, images of youth and age, heterosexuality and homosexuality, male and female, life and death, the real and the “fantastic,” and God and the devil, or “spook,” as Shannon calls him. In Eastern terms, “Iguana” dramatizes the yin and yang by way of pursuing harmony.
Nonno, Hannah’s nonagenariangrandfather, spends the play writing a brilliantly succinct poem that embodies this diametric seesaw, then nods off and dies. In one of his early speeches, he echoes Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” speech, relating the infirmity of age to the helplessness of infancy, condensing both into a lifespan that comes full circle in a setting by the sea, which Nonno flippantly labels “the cradle of life.”
Similarly, Nonno’s short poem recited at the end of the drama condenses the entire cycle of life-birth, fear, struggle and death-into a brief rhyme on the fate of an orange branch.
The thunder and lightning on the island (a veritable hurricane at the hands of Goodman designer Jeff Muskovin) are the outer symbols of Shannon’s inner turmoil, just as the branch in the poem stands for mankind’s struggle against all the tempests of living and dying.
And all this occurs on an idyllic, ramshackle veranda, nestled into the lush, vernal greenhouse of Loy Arcenas’ set like a giant bird’s nest, another symbol, this one referring to our hunger for home and respite.
What distinguishes “Iguana,” in other words, is this dense system of poetic images linking its elemental themes with art and nature. But even more powerful is Williams’ own astute clarity in tackling elusive, intangible, inarticulate human feelings and fears, giving rare voice, in some of the finest dialogue he wrote, to man’s ongoing battle to endure universal ills and touch both God and hope in the process.
“We live in a time when the issues of recovery are strong,” Falls says. “But without any of our pop psychology, this was a textbook for healing, for making peace with one’s self and with God.”
The two main characters’ long dialogue together, which takes actors Cherry Jones as Hannah and William Petersen as Shannon much of the 80 minutes or so of the production’s second half, is one of the most remarkable colloquies in all dramatic literature.
Most debates pit person against person. This one forges a special, rare onstage bond, pitting a man and a woman together against evil, despair, insanity and surrender.
In the flowing, rhapsodic language that so elevates his plays, Williams has Hannah say that, after her own troubles, she “began to see this faint, very faint gray light-the light of the world outside me-and I kept climbing toward it. I had to.”
She tells Shannon of a place in the Orient, a house of the dying where the poor go for their final rest, and of the vision she found in the eyes there, of “the last little comforts.” “Nothing I’ve ever seen has seemed as beautiful to me, not even the view from this veranda between the sky and the still-water beach.”
She tells him that people must find a kind of temporal home, either somewhere (the nest of the hotel itself, for instance) or, if lucky, with some other person.
When Shannon counters that such a bond should be sexual, implying she is a virgin, she says, “not always,” and tells one of Williams’ most beautiful stories, the saga of her sad ride with a traveling salesman who asked for an article of her underwear to aid his own masturbation.
Doesn’t that disgust her, Shannon asks. “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, cruel,” Hannah replies. Shannon is comforted, enlightened by all this, and to show it he gives in to her whim and cuts loose an iguana the staff has caught and tied to the veranda’s banister.
Let’s play God, Shannon says, and cut one of His creatures free-just as every character in the drama struggles at the end of a rope, uncertain when freedom will come, if ever.
For the iguana and Shannon, freedom comes for the night, at least. Hannah, so cool on the surface, thanks to her steadfast New England reserve, affects a cardinal act of mercy by dropping her guard and sharing her suffering and wisdom with someone else.
By untying Shannon from the hammock, by calming his anxieties, by getting him through the night and giving him some comfort and hope, she plays God and sets His creature free.
Throughout this remarkable fable, Williams never settles for any cheap or easy answers. As uplifting and high-flown as his language gets, he is never sentimental, though countless bad productions of “Iguana” have made him seem so. As part of his own adjustment, Shannon settles for the carnal polarity of the two women in the story, deciding to stay for a while with the lusty widow Maxine as a temporary refuge.
In that sense, Shannon finds something that eludes Tom and Laura (“The Glass Menagerie”) and certainly Blanche Du Bois: solace.
That it is temporary, that no final peace may ever come for Shannon, is evident in everything from the fate of Nonno, whose death ends the play, to the uncertain fate of Hannah and the doom that plagued playwright Williams for the remaining 22 years of his life after this play, his last commercial success.
Falls calls the play Williams’ most autobiographical, and Cherry Jones says even her New England spinster talks like a Southern gay man, “spouting verbal bouquets flush with baby’s breath.” Petersen, clad in Williams-like white linen, affecting a sibilant Southern gentleman’s voice, takes on his most challenging stage role since “In the Belly of the Beast.”
He confesses the part has actually caused him personal anxiety and sleeplessness like no other. “They all get through the night,” Falls says of the characters. “But who knows what happens when the sun comes up?”
In the end, Dickinson’s stanza tells all, that the temporary hope of spiritual communion is the most one can expect from a path to a resting place, where, no matter our triumphs or tormented struggles, the moss will inevitably cover our names and skulls at last.
