Word: iguana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unnatural affections. Other critics think that Williams' choice of themes shows America to be -as angry young British Playwright John Osborne puts it -"as sex-obsessed as a medieval monastery." Yet Tennessee Williams fills foreign playhouses from Athens to Tokyo, and his current play, The Night of the Iguana, though it shuns obsession with sex, is a box-office sellout and much the best new American play of the season...
...rack of guilt, in the slough of doubt, more homeless than any migratory bird, Tennessee Williams wrestles with his fears. "I pray a lot, especially when I'm scared," he says. No one who sees The Night of the Iguana will need to be told the words. They are in Nonno's poem...
...tantrums as impolite, part of Williams' cathartic appeal for an audience is to allow it to act out its hostilities vicariously. Above all, Williams is a master of mood. Sometimes it is hot, oppressive, simmering with catastrophe (Streetcar, Cat); at other times it is sad, autumnal, elegiac (Menagerie, Iguana). To achieve it, he uses the full orchestra of theatrical instruments: setting, lighting, music, plus the one impalpable, indispensable gift, the genius for making an audience forget that any other world exists except the one onstage...
Four Who Live Through. The Night of the Iguana is Williams' greatest play of self-transcendence. Esthetically, it is a comeback from recent plays (Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer), in which he seemed to confuse assaults on the nerves with cries from the heart. Instead of willful self-destruction, the characters in Iguana are bent on living through and beyond despair...
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...