Word: iguanas
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...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...
...Iguana has the hue of hope. At the end, Shannon stays with the Widow Faulk to help make a go of the hotel. Nonno completes his poem. Though he dies and Hannah must go on alone, she has been given the strength to do it. Yet it is the anguished daily testing of existence itself that Hannah seems fearful of as she utters the last lines of the play. Lifting her eyes toward the heavens, she pleads, "Oh God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please let us! It's so quiet here...
...every two years. But before that, he marinates impressions, characters, experiences. Iguana emerged from a 1940 trip to Acapulco. By 1946, it was a short story. By 1959, it was a one-act play, produced at a theater festival in Spoleto, Italy. Four separate versions followed, and to compare them is to watch sand turning into Baccarat crystal. Says Williams: "It takes five or six years to use something out of life. It's lurking in the unconscious- it finds its meaning there." Essentially, Williams has been chosen by his subjects...