Theatre in Review: The Night of the Iguana (La Femme Theatre Productions)

	Daphne Rubin-Vega, Tim Daly. Photo: Joan Marcus

The Night of the Iguana is Tennessee Williams' showdown at the Last Chance Hotel. Officially called the Costa Verde, it's a rattletrap retreat, set high above the ocean, which acts as a terminus for the dying, impecunious, and spiritually bankrupt. The guest list includes the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, locked out of his church and currently in the throes of his third nervous breakdown; Nonno, an elderly minor poet ("ninety-seven years young!") whose hearing and sight are rapidly fading; and Hannah Jelkes, his granddaughter, a painter and quick-sketch artist, who, after years of living by her wits, has run out of money and prospects. It is 1940 and, adding a sinister note are the Germans who, on their way to the beach, report, delightedly, that, according to radio reports, London will soon be in Hitler's grasp.

Written at a low point for Williams -- his relationship with partner Frank Merlo was unraveling and his longtime director (and support system) Elia Kazan had moved on -- the play is a cri de coeur from an aging writer terrified that his talent is played out. It didn't help that the show endured a nightmarish pre-Broadway tryout, with stars Bette Davis and Patrick O'Neal at one point literally at each other's throats. Iguana's critical and commercial success -- including a subsequent hit film starring Richard Burton, Ava Garder, and Deborah Kerr -- did little to heal the scars. Everything that followed was strictly downhill for the famously demon-plagued playwright.

The Night of the Iguana is a tricky piece - it is long, talky, and filled with fractious encounters yet it climaxes in an extraordinary baring of souls that requires the most sensitive handling -- and it cries out for a kind of bravura acting that is missing from Emily Mann's production. Everyone involved seems to know which notes to hit, but they do so either unconvincingly or in a muted fashion. Such half-measures are no good; the often-tentative quality of the acting drains the play of tension.

Ousted from his church after a sex scandal followed by a scalding Sunday sermon that got him branded an atheist, Shannon gets by as a tour guide in Mexico, alternately boozing and bedding his female customers and driving himself mad with repentance. At odds with a busload of Baptist college teachers ("a football squad of old maids") and caught sleeping with an underage client, he brings his shattered nerves to the Costa Verde, where he hopes the owner, Fred, can, once again, talk him off a psychological ledge. But Fred has died in a freak accident, his body tossed into the ocean. Meanwhile, the Baptist ladies are in revolt and Shannon's job is in danger, leaving him with the prospect of nowhere to go.

In this, arguably the most Manichean of Williams' plays, Shannon is like a man on a rack, torn between flesh and spirit, qualities embodied in the play's leading ladies. Maxine -- Fred's wife, now in charge of the hotel -- may not count as a merry widow, but she is a frankly predatory one, keeping a couple of beach boys around for fun while pouncing on Shannon at the first opportunity. Plying him with rum cocos while he shakily clings to the wagon, Maxine is more than willing to offer a little sexual healing. But Shannon likes them young, is moreover disgusted by his desires, and has delusions of returning to the pulpit. At odds, their scenes constitute a battle for possession powered by lust and hostility, coming close to physical violence.

And yet, from the moment Daphne Rubin-Vega enters, hands on hips, all but falling out of her low-cut blouse, and barking out a coarse "Hah!", one has the impression of an intelligent, thoughtful actress working overtime at playing a monster. Maxine is all appetite, compelling in her honesty, and a little frightening in the way she grasps at pleasure. Shannon calls her "bigger than life and twice as unnatural," but in Rubin-Vega's hands she is petite, precise, and lacking in animal vitality; one never senses her readiness to devour Shannon whole. The performance is not a washout -- she captures Maxine's oddly philosophical side, and she has a good bit with Jean Lichty's Hannah, by way of informing her that eviction can be avoided if she leaves Shannon alone. But the character's defining raucous humor and sexual menace are missing.

Shannon, a character of profound contradictions, is filled with self-loathing -- he routinely accuses his teenage lovers of being the aggressors, then subjects them to post-coital acts of abuse and forced repentance -- and he should be, at first glance, ready to jump out of his skin. But Tim Daly starts on a surprisingly low boil, remaining there too long. Shannon has my favorite insult in the Williams canon ("Maxine honey, whoever told you that you look good in tight pants was not a sincere friend of yours.") but his fencing with Maxine is never as malicious or witty as one would like. The actor calls up some fury later on, when, falling into hysteria, he gets tied up and stashed in a hammock, and he and Rubin-Vega crackle in a classic bit of staging involving a weaponized cocktail cart. But the sense of a mind perilously close to cracking up isn't there.

Lichty, founder of La Femme Productions, probably gets closest to Williams' vision of saintly, infinitely patient, yet iron-willed Hannah who, dragging Nonno around the world, has lived close to a precipice for so long that has lost any fear of falling off. She is touching when appealing to Maxine's nonexistent sympathy, yet she isn't afraid to call out Shannon, coolly noting that he is a voluptuary when it comes to emotional torment. But the play climaxes in a long night-of-the-soul conversation between Hannah and Shannon that must be played with a life-or-death urgency that neither actor can quite summon, and the final act wanders into dullness.

The supporting cast has its moments. As the head Baptist battle-axe, Lea DeLaria hardly convinces as a pillar of rectitude, but there's something perfectly sinister about the way she turns the word "defrocked" into a two-syllable hanging sentence. Carmen Berkeley blends outraged innocence and youthful ardor as the tour's in-house Lolita. Keith Randolph Smith is welcome as the tour company representative who symbolically castrates Shannon by confiscating his bus keys. And Austin Pendleton is frailty itself as Nonno, a living ghost holding on by the thinnest of threads.

There isn't a more gorgeously designed production in town thanks to Beowulf Boritt's set, which poetically evokes the hotel with three doors and a roof on a raked deck that seems to float in an ever-changing sky informed by Jeff Croiter's colorful, painterly time-of-day looks. Each of Jennifer von Mayrhauser's costumes is a character study in itself, especially Hannah's modestly layered look, so true to her yet so inappropriate in a tropical setting. Darron L West fluidly blends marimba bands, birdsong, surf, thunder, and rain into a heavily atmospheric soundscape.

But a play that trades in sexual savagery and spiritual despair -- consider its images of a bound, terrified iguana or of the starving scrounging for bits of food on a dunghill -- is strangely lacking in the extreme emotions that make it so powerful. Mann's production keeps this Iguana on a short leash, and it doesn't benefit from such treatment. --David Barbour