Review: The Night of the Iguana, the Tennessee Williams Drama Tied Up Under the Porch

In the third act of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, we’re treated to the ludicrous sight of a supposed Virginia gentleman bound and struggling in a hammock on the veranda of a cheap Mexican hotel. His captor is a New England spinster who intends to tame him — with opium. But not if he can seduce her first. It’s the history of our country in one naughty gay cocktail party joke, and a prime example of Williams’s mesmerizing showcase of genuine human emotion in outlandish circumstance — of the realistic and fantastic. It’s a shame that La Femme Theatre’s off-Broadway revival, now at the Pershing Square Signature Center, fails to fully exploit this potent dramatic potion.

The play takes place in late summer 1940 at the Costa Verde Hotel on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Maxine Faulk (Daphne Rubin-Vega) runs the place with her two employees, Pedro (Bradley James Tejeda) and Pancho (Dan Teixeira). Her husband and co-proprietor is just two weeks dead when former reverend and present tour guide T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly) shows up with a busload of Texas Baptist ladies, including the 17-year-old Charlotte (Carmen Berkeley) and her uncomfortably possessive voice teacher (an underutilized Lea Delaria). The Costa Verde is not on their itinerary, but Shannon is at the end of his rope and insists they rest there for a few days. Maxine hopes she can convince him to stay permanently.

At the same time, itinerant sketch artist Hannah Jelkes (Jean Lichty) arrives with her grandfather (Austin Pendleton), who claims to be the world’s oldest living poet. Every other hotel in town has turned them away and Maxine isn’t eager to take them in, sniffing their poverty from down the road. But Shannon, old horndog that he is, discerns an alluring challenge in the innocent stranger and invites her to stay without consulting management. This should be a big red flag for Maxine, but in this story full of beggars, who can afford to be choosy?

One of Williams’s more fantastic flourishes involves the presence of a family of rich German tourists who are also staying at the hotel and spend much of their time gleefully listening to radio reports about the London blitz. In this production, young Hilda and Wolfgang have been left back in Frankfurt, leaving Herr and Frau Fahrenkopf (Michael Leigh Cook and Alena Acker) to represent Nazi Germany alone. Their presence is mostly an afterthought, and an awkward sight gag featuring Herr Fahrenkopf goose-stepping to the beach with a case of beer fails to earn laughs.

It’s not entirely the fault of the performers. The rhythm and timing of director Emily Mann’s production feels off throughout, with actors tripping over lines and plowing through much of the script’s lush verbiage. Daly adopts a slight stutter in his portrayal of Shannon, making the nervous minister sound like a muted Foghorn Leghorn. Pendleton is more convincing as the old poet, desperately dishing out his one-liners in fear he won’t be able to remember them soon; but even he stumbles. Rubin-Vega seems fully at ease with the language of the play, but her physical presence is surprisingly meek for a character that has been played by both Bette Davis and Ava Gardner.

Only Tejeda and Teixeira deliver truly enthralling performances as the vigorous, oversexed, potentially dangerous bellhops, lending specific personalities to characters that have too often been presented as exotic scenery. The play seems to perk up every time they slink onstage. It’s a lovely tribute to Williams’s perennially fascination with trade.

Lichty, who is the founder and executive director of La Femme, is surprisingly miscast as Hannah. While she does have the presence of a woman you might see padding between her rent-controlled apartment and a community garden on the Upper West Side (an ideal vibe for a Nantucket spinster), her effusive, slightly mushy delivery is all wrong for Hannah’s sharply written lines. It doesn’t help that Lichty’s hair often obscures her face (at least for house right). The third-act scene between Shannon and Hannah ought to feel like a tennis volley between two evenly matched players, but here the ball gets stuck in the mud.

The design is competent if unremarkable: Scenic designer Beowulf Boritt delivers a tiny tropical oasis, with the veranda jutting out into the front row of the audience. A spectacular sunset takes place on the upstage cyclorama (attractive lighting by Jeff Croiter). Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costumes give us an immediate sense of the characters and what they’ve recently been through: Shannon enters wearing a supremely wrinkled linen suit, while Maxine looks cool and relaxed — in jeans! Nature noises pervade Darron L. West’s nighttime soundscape. That includes the scratching of the titular iguana, which Pedro and Pancho have trapped under the veranda for a future meal.

Wordy and slow to develop, The Night of the Iguana works best when it draws the audience into its intrigue by allowing us to glimpse the fantastic hiding among the mundane. Unfortunately, that never really happens in this rudderless production. By the third hour, it was clear the squirmy audience sympathized most with the lizard.