The Night of the Iguana
City Theatre, 3823-D Airport, 474-8497
Through April 9
Running time: 2 hr., 35 min.
Tennessee Williams wrote three plays that will most certainly stand the test of time. The Night of the Iguana is not one of them. In its day, the early Sixties, it most likely shocked, with its hot plot set on a sultry Mexican coastline and the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked priest, abandoning his job as tour guide for a busload of teenage Texas Baptists after committing statutory rape with a member of the party. And it could shock now, because despite its more than somewhat comic trappings, what we are ultimately asked to observe is the dissolute breakdown and ultimate surrender of a human soul.
That’s a tall order for any theatrical group to stage and an even more difficult challenge for a community theatre, even one with as fine a repertoire as Austin’s Different Stages. But when the company of actors – assembled by director Norman Blumensaadt – is up to it, they’re quite up to it. Tom Chamberlain, a Different Stages veteran, plays Shannon, and no matter which of the five or six (or seven – who knows?) versions of the play that you use, it’s a bear of role. Shannon enters right on the verge of a breakdown, hyped and way out on the edge, and he babbles and rationalizes and justifies and defends. He rarely slows down even when he’s lying down. Chamberlain plays him well, especially in the first act, allowing us to see the utter absurdity of his situation as he discovers it himself and to laugh with him.
While much of the cast turns in more than adequate performances and the design more than adequately supports the story, there’s still that difficult script. One version is so top-heavy with talk that it probably would play at four hours. This one comes in at two and a half, and it could still use some trimming. Characters sometimes say the same thing – sometimes say exactly the same thing – three and even four times and totally unnecessarily. But no matter how you trim it, you’re still challenged with that final scene, in which Shannon experiences his personal apocalypse. I don’t wish to be a spoiler, but it has something to do with the iguana of the title, with what the locals do to fatten it up and get it ready for the fire, and with Shannon facing a choice between two sides of the same coin, which, of course, isn’t really a choice at all.
Williams wrote a funny play, that’s for certain. He also wrote a repetitive and deeply flawed play. It isn’t even so much that it’s dated. It’s more that two of the roles in particular require actors who can take ineffective material and make it considerably better with the sheer audacity of their talent and with the depth of realization of their characters. You don’t get that here, and with this play in particular, I’m not even certain that it’s possible.
This article appears in March 25 • 2011.