Word: faulk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel near Acapulco, in Mexico. The hotelkeeper, the Widow Maxine Faulk, played by Bette Davis, is a hostage to devil-in-the-flesh sensuality. T. Lawrence Shannon (Patrick O'Neal), a defrocked clergyman turned tourist guide, is spooked by guilt. As a man who was barred from his church for committing "fornication and heresy in the same week," O'Neal seems agonizingly nailed to a cross of nerves. Nonno (Alan Webb), a 97-year-old poet, is the prisoner of art and age, struggling between memory lapses to finish a new poem. Hannah...
There are some Williams-patented shockers in Iguana, but they are muted in the air of near-Oriental serenity that envelops the play. There is a speech of Widow Faulk's in which she tells of overhearing Shannon's account of how his mother caught him practicing "the little boy's vice" and spanked him with a hairbrush for angering "both God and Mama." Shannon's explanation of his adult behavior is that he "got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls.'' Then...
...Costa Verde Hotel is bare, but it steams with heat. It is like a raft in the green sea of the Mexican jungle, a vision of the end of the world for people at the end of their rope. Gradually, a quartet of life's castaways assembles. Maxine Faulk (Bette Davis) is the recently widowed proprietor of the hotel, a spitfire sensualist who regards her unbuttoned-to-the-waist body as her soul. T. Lawrence Shannon (Patrick O'Neal) is an alcoholic, defrocked minister who herds lady-tourists off the guidebook route, but is himself spooked by bottomless...
...brushes with love. Touched by their mutual need, Shannon asks if they might not make a go of life together. It is Hannah's kindness to be cruel. "Accept whatever situation you cannot improve," she has told him, and releases him to the zesty affections of the Widow Faulk. The moral: human nature is a constant, not a variable, and love, like water, seeks its own level...
...when the U.S. gave out territorially, Americans greedily tried for a share of the overseas market. Even poor old Walt Whitman has to share the blame, because he applauded "personal regeneration." When confronted by a problem, Whitman walked away, as many of his heirs from Mark Twain to William Faulk ner were to do, and became "a wayfarer down the open road...