THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Emily Mann
Pershing Square Signature Center
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
It is high summer, 1940, in the Coste Verde Hotel in Puerto Barrio on the west coast of Mexico. Jungle territory, really, with a no-frills motel dropped in the center, for naïve tourists or, more often, travelers who are tough enough to take it. And this is the setting, in Tennessee William’s Night of the Iguana for another of that playwright’s signature collision of opposites. They are a defrocked reverend (Tim Daly), so uncontrollably a slave to his passion that the schism between his religious convictions and his moral degradation leaves him constantly on the brink—and often beyond the brink—of nervous breakdown…he barely holds life together as a questionable tour guide of the area…and a primly alluring spinster (Jean Lichty), who has never indulged such passions, save for an intellectual romanticism. Fate throws these two together, in that tropic environment and steam should not be far behind.
You’d think.
But at the Signature, Night of the Iguana, despite being respectably presented, is absent the palpable sexual tension. We know it’s there because the play alludes to it, and because the ensemble is appropriately cast in the sense that all credibly fit their profiles. But viscerally, the couple at the center, the couple who will mate only in words, as deeper desires roar under the surface, have a curious lack of chemistry.
I hasten to add, though, I’ve now seen this play several times…as I check my records, more times than I even remembered offhand—and I’m no longer so sure the potential for that chemistry exists, not between those two characters. I’ve never seen it and I think perhaps the writing resists it.
As with several usually inspired actresses I’ve seen previously—Dorothy Maguire, Maria Tucci, Cherry Jones—the gifted Ms. Lichty is not rising to the task either. No mistake, she gives a tasteful, controlled and artful performance—to match the character’s own meticulous control—but we never see, not to any degree that registers or matters, the pain behind that control, what it has cost her character to refrain from human contact. And this time, I think for the first time in my experience, the defrocked reverend has an actor fully in the zone; Tim Daly can present an easy and convincing leading-man swagger. But Daly has always been terrific at light comedy too, and his innate sense of timing—of the character’s ironies—allows him to imbue that swagger with a sense of shabby desperation that is equally authentic.
I think too that there’s an imbalance in the writing provided by the third character in what should be an obvious triangle that is never exploited as such: that of the uninhibited middle-aged libertine who runs this jungle version of the no-tell motel. Daphne Rubin-Vega doesn’t, alas, have the level of sensual electricity the role should ideally display, but she has the conspicuous physicality for it (specified in the dialogue) and gets the message across: she’s not in thrall to the reverend, but she’ll satisfy herself with him and seems to genuinely like him; plus, she’s funny, wry, and vulnerable. That’s the romantic coupling you quietly root for, despite anything the play otherwise suggests, because those are the two characters who can heal each other. But the reverend takes her for granted and she seems to take that in stride. As if the story Tennessee Williams wants to tell is in conflict with the story he’s actually telling.
Director Emily Mann has done yeoman (yeowoman? yeoperson?) service to the text, it’s all cleanly and competently done. But try as she might, it’s all uphill trying to make the play more than a Williams filtering of Shavian dialectic. There’s a decent supporting cast (a special nod to the comic scene chewing of Lea DeLaria as a no-nonsense church lady on the reverend’s current tour)—but because center doesn’t crackle the play seems to languish, thrashing about occasionally, but in vain…much like its unseen iguana, beneath the floorboards of the hotel’s veranda, tied to a stake under the sun…