Word: iguana
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...Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. In a play of nocturnal mood and meaning, Williams assembles a defrocked minister, a Nantucket spinster, a sensual spitfire and a nonagenarian poet on a Mexican hotel veranda, where their defeated dreams converge in an elegiac pattern of destiny...
...Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams, makes a tethered lizard a symbol of the condition of man, while above it, on a Mexican veranda, Bette Davis, Patrick O'Neal and Margaret Leighton tug with poetic fury at fetters of mind, body and spirit...
...office at curtain time can generally plunk down their money and walk right in. One night last week, for example, only three of Broadway's 29 shows were sold out by 5 130: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Night of the Iguana and Milk and Honey. (Since the most publicized shows are the ones that nearly all out-of-town visitors want to see. the impossible-ticket myth has spread all over the U.S.) Tickets were available not only for long-running shows (Camelot, Mary, Mary) but also for new productions: Ross, A Shot...
What happens to these characters in Iguana is less important than what has happened to them in the past. They must cope with defeated dreams, not future hopes. The play is fragmented, but the theme is whole. It is the theme that has always possessed Williams-the violated heart-violation by repression, starvation, brutalization, isolation. A brooding sense of aloneness and man's yearning need for human contact is uppermost in Iguana. After the empty self-parody of Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana restores to playgoers the Williams who can create a poetry of mood...
...iguana of the title is a giant lizard leashed under the veranda and clawing for its freedom-just as Shannon, the defrocked minister, is roped to a hammock during a mental crackup. Shannon and Hannah, the spinster, dominate the play, and break through to each other as they struggle with fetters of body and spirit. He tells her how he was locked out of his church for "fornication and heresy-in the same week." His revenge: loveless lecheries with teen-age girls, one of whom (Lane Bradbury) claws at his door with embarrassing anguish. Hannah tells him of pathetic fingertip...