"... compelling, throbbing with emotion"

August 3, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The time is 1940 and the place a run-down hotel on a jungle hilltop overlooking the beach near Costa Verde, Mexico. The heat so intense that even the horrendous thunderstorm that bombards the stage at the end of the first act, cannot break it. And emotions run high, intensely, devastatingly

Tennessee Williams in his major plays, and Night of the Iguana, now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival is one of them, demands soul- tortured characters, minutely detailed realistic settings, and most of all bigger than life leading characters.

Fortunately in this production, he receives them. The play is compelling, throbbing with emotion. At times it vibrates with intensity and rapid activity. At other moments, two characters alone on the stage will quietly compel respect and pity.

The plot swirls around four leading characters, in this production well cast and each giving a rounded, vital performance. Indeed, they seem to inhabit the roles, not just play them.

Lawrence Shannon (Garrett Dillahunt) is still young but already lost. At the end of the play, he is able to free the Iguana but not himself. He is an unfrocked Episcopalian minister, whose religious career has been a very brief one, ending when he shocked his congregations with his belief in an amoral God.

He has somehow become a tourist guide, chaperoning groups of American Church Ladies on t rips to Mexico where he delights in showing them the under-belly, seamy sides of life, and where he has a weakness for seducing young girls. His broken down bus, strands him and his customers at the site of the play. By the play’s end he will have been forced to surrender the bus key and the ladies will have departed with another driver.

Dillahunt inhabits his role with dynamic intensity. He is running a fever and literally exudes hotness. He explodes with vehemence, hallucinates, lopes off to the beach at the plays end with sex very possible, yet has been moved to quiet respect by the purity of the New England spinster. It is for her purity, one he shall never know himself, for he seems lost beyond recall, that he frees the iguana.

Amelia Campbell is compelling as Hannah Jelkes, the middle-aged yet virginal artist who has all her adult life been traveling the world with her 97 year old grandfather, a former minor poet, eking out an existence by entertaining tourists at the hotels where they stay—she by painting portraits, he by reciting his poems. Her strength has carried them along, and she employs it courageously and does not flinch even before Shannon’s withering scorn of her virginity.

While he radiates heat, she radiates cold courage, in her very dress of modest robe (virginal blue) while she quietly but chillingly recounts, as he demands, her two “sexual encounters” with a sad dignity. A high moment in this intensely charged play.

The hotel’s owner, Maxine Faulk, (Linda Hamilton) radiates her sexual encounters. The play opens with her emerging from one of them and ends with her heading for another on the beach. Her unbuttoned blouse and bared breasts are a part of her provocative character. She has pity, but not much. She is vulgar, earthy, lusty and will go on with her life, tearless, enduring. A splendidly etched role.

Nonno, the old poet is quietly present even when not part of the on going action, spending much of his time in his lamp lit room, droning lines that will become his last poem, his final testament. His poetic gift has been silent for years, but now in this final moment, it comes and he emerges to recite for Hannah to transcribe.

It is a sad poem, expressing what Williams has been, through his characters, struggling to show us—how in nature the earth blooms, blossoms and shines, but cannot hold the glory, fades, withers and dies. How nature seems to accept this but man cannot. Always in the heart of man is the fear. William Swan makes us love this old poet as his granddaughter has done all these years. He may not be a great poet but he is worth all the devotion she has given him. She has understood his fear with an unconditional love.

And thus his poem warrants quoting—the last two stanza’s only since it is long, but fortunately the program prints it all.

       
        And still the ripe fruit and the branch
        Observe the sky begin to blanch
        Without a cry, without a prayer,
        With no betrayal of despair.

        Oh, Courage, could you not as well
        Select a second  place to dwell,
        Not only in that golden tree
        But in the frightened heart of me?
        

When the aged man reads these lines, the character is rounded, finished, and we see the terror that has been with him all these years of traveling the world, trying to make a life, trying to find a poem, trying to understand what it is to be human.

It is the same terror that Shannon felt that defrocked him and has sent him in free-fall, that has dogged him and still does as the play ends.

This play, in its magnificently designed setting by Carl Sprague (all rooms, doors, windows, stairs and balconies, and magnificently lit by Jeff Davis) ends with no answers. But the questions it raises fascinate. And the cast is magnificent.

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