The Night of the Iguana, like the reptile in its name, needs a little heat to get moving. That’s true of most Tennessee Williams, and especially his later and more lurid work. On Broadway in 1961, this humid and histrionic love triangle of sorts, set in a dingy resort on the west coast of Mexico, was the last of his critical and commercial success—afterward, his writing got even more off-the-wall—and it’s got a feverish quality that makes it tough to revive. It’s a jungle of rambling speeches about spirituality, weird variations of familiar Williams character tropes (including, naturally, a washed-up seducer with a thing for a virginal young woman), and some triple-underlined iguana-based metaphors. Tempting as it may be to try to cool the material that the hell down and look for clarity in the tangle of Williams-isms, for the play to work I think you have to be willing to turn the temperature up instead—stare down the maximalism and embrace it.
That’s proven by La Femme Theatre’s considered but inert revival of The Night of the Iguana. Emily Mann, directing a take on the show that originated as a lockdown-era Zoom reading, emphasizes the cool, lonely despair of Williams’s strung-out characters, but leaves you wanting an emotional and sexual charge that might better propel its plot forward. It echoes many of the frustrations of Theater for a New Audience’s unsteady production of another infrequently seen Williams play, Orpheus Descending, a few months ago. If directors are going to keep taking swings at Williams, they have to get everyone’s pulse rate up. In Iguana, there’s plenty of introspection—some of it well and delicately rendered—but not enough momentum to grip you. The characters keep bracing for a storm, yet Mann’s production stays placid.
A lot of the play’s success depends on the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, played here by Tim Daly. He’s a familiar kind of Williams horny wretch, rendered in extremis: A defrocked priest who’s taken a job leading woman schoolteachers on bus tours. Fed up with the group, and already in trouble for seducing an underage musical prodigy, he diverts his tour to a cheap hotel run by his old friend’s widow Maxine (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Daly, shaking in a tattered white suit, gives Shannon all the nerves of an addict near yet-another breakdown, but he never quite brings an underlying carnal energy that underlies Shannon’s self-destructive impulses. We’re told that in the past he’s impulsively slept with women, then hit them, then forced them to pray with him, but Daly, who has an approachable and even sweet-seeming mien, is never threatening in that way: You pity him, but you don’t fear what he might do.
That becomes an issue considering the women who circle around Shannon. Maxine harbors more than a bit of affection for him and is used to caring for him when he gets spooked, though she’s in no way exclusive, always up for a night swim with someone. Rubin-Vega brings her exquisite rasp to the part and swaggers around the stage with aplomb—she does some very funny prop work bashing open coconuts with a machete—but even when she straddles the former preacher in his hammock, her possessiveness reads as more that of a caretaker than a needy lover. Mann has said she wanted to pull away from “the usual sexy-kitten, sex-bomb thing†with Maxine, a noble approach but that characterization is there for a reason: This script needs a little heightened, uncomfortable mania. Her Maxine reads as a fun, competent hotel manager. I think you need more mess.
Especially once another woman with an interest in Shannon arrives at the hotel: Hannah Jelkes, played by Jean Lichty. She fashions herself as a gentlewoman painter traveling the world with her aging poet grandfather (Austin Pendleton, precise and hilarious as he pontificates from his wheelchair), though she’s as much of a grifter as the rest, making what little she can selling watercolors and sketches to tourists. Maxine distrusts Hannah immediately, and then more so once Hannah and Shannon start talking. Together, the two of them could be a pulp-beach-read Blanche and Stanley: a self-deluded paper woman and an impulsive brute of a man. But Lichty and Daly don’t spark like that. Litchty does an airy, mannered accent, but keeps Hannah’s need for Shannon to tightly under control. Maxine’s soon threatened by the “vibrations†she senses between Hannah and Shannon, but it’s hard, in this version, to see what could be so dangerous about the dynamic between them. Here, too, there’s no threat of boiling over, just a low, contemplative simmer.
There are, admittedly, things to be uncovered by this approach. Mann’s production does best when, in the third act, Shannon and Hannah spend a dark night of the soul together sipping poppy tea after he’s had a breakdown. She describes her few brief and lonely sexual encounters with men, and he opens up more fully about his sense of spiritual abandonment. They also talk a lot, yes, about that trapped iguana. In the blue night light, surrounded by the rusted metal and creaky wood of Beowulf Borritt’s set, there’s an air of mutual confession and healing—two burnouts finding some kind of peace in the ashes. But where’s the immolation that got them there? There are two long acts before you hit that moment, and they are tough, slow going without a flame.
The Night of the Iguana is at the Pershing Square Signature Center.