Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana Off-Broadway Reviews

While not his most elegant work, Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” about a group of lost souls at a coastal hotel in 1940s Mexico, is not without its misty pleasures. Even as his characters stumble tragically in search of meaning, their convictions carry the sharp-tongued certainty of soap opera idols. But a new revival from La Femme Theater at the Signature Center mires itself too deeply in its characters’ confusions to let the edges of his language shine. It’s an issue of confidence, with Emily Mann directing her cast away from Williams’s assured dialogue and toward their characters’ flailing. And this play, with a defrocked minister who now leads Baptist church ladies on unreliable bus tours at its center, already has plenty of flailing

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 piercing poetry of Williams’ words flickers into life many times, but also feel missed and blurred. Nonno’s poem, as it is finally delivered—about an olive branch observing the sky—feels underwhelming, rather than a profound underline. Williams may have known or imagined a way to crystallize The Night of the Iguana into knowability—but this almost 3-hour production feels lost, even as its actors valiantly attempt to do the same.

Daly’s Shannon is competent, but his jittery gruffness doesn’t leave enough room for sympathy, and it’s not exactly crazed enough to insert a sense of exciting theatricality in the midst of the more human (and maybe more banal) crisis of faith and sanity. Lichty’s Hannah, in comparison, is soft, gentle, perhaps prudish. She is supposed to be tender where Shannon is prickly, serene where he is sweaty. But her dramatic dilemma — her loneliness and the way in which her clear-eyed belief in connection contrasts with Shannon’s failure of faith — feel a bit undercooked. Her performance is reminiscent of Mia Farrow in Woody Allen movies, with the timbre of Jane Fonda’s voice, but without the forcefulness. Between the pair, there isn’t enough thrust, even if it’s to get through the evening with one’s scruples or heart intact.

Shortened and much tweaked, it eliminates, for instance, Nazi enthusiasts Herr Fahrenkopf and Frau Fahrenkopf, played broadly on stage now by Michael Leigh Cook and Alena Acker. Many other redactions crop up to tighten Williams’ solo work. Able to open up the setting, Huston occasionally leaves the veranda for ogling Gardner’s water frolicking with Pedro and Pancho, no visual letdown. Oh, well, that’s how the collaborative arts sometimes go.

Two hours and fifty minutes. That’s all I knew about this production of the Tennessee Williams classic and I was prepared for a long sit. Not that there’s anything wrong with lengthy dramas but often the old plays could benefit from some surgical trimming. Well I’m very happy to say the La Femme Theatre Productions’ revival of The Night of the Iguana is an engrossing sit, beautifully acted under the direction of Emily Mann who mined every shred of nuance and wisdom embedded in this deeply felt work.