Riley Shanahan and Jully Lee (Photo by Brian Hashimoto)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Boston Court
Through October 19
Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the came into being first as an essay, then a short story, and lastly as a one-act before finally emerging as a full length theater piece, though that too went through a couple of permutations before premiering on Broadway in 1961. Regarded as Williams’s last major drama, the play embraces multiple dichotomies: the material versus the spiritual, social convention versus personal liberty, faith versus heresy, sexual compulsion versus its moral opprobrium, the struggle to salvage the self versus an even greater urge to destroy it. As with all Williams’ work, its most compelling aspect is how brilliantly it illuminates the fragile dreams and terrible loneliness of so many of us, the marginalized in particular.
The Night of the Iguana is set in a hotel in the hills overlooking a rain forest somewhere on the West Coast of Mexico. The locale was inspired by a sojourn Williams took in 1940 following the disintegration of his relationship with dancer Kip Kiernan (née Bernard Dubowsky), a Canadian draft dodger he met in Provincetown earlier that year. According to some biographers, Kiernan was the 29-year-old Williams’s first great love. Iguana, set in 1940, is intense, moody, and emotionally explosive. It’s easy to imagine how Williams’s recollections of Mexico and the hotel where he stayed are filtered into the story he spins in the play, which is now being revived at Boston Court under Jessica Kubzansky’s direction.
Iguana’s pivotal character is the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Riley Shanahan), a de-frocked pastor in his 30s who drinks heavily and ekes out a living as a travel guide. Like others in Williams’s pantheon of lost, distressed souls — Blanche from Streetcar and Brick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to mention two — he’s entrapped in a world whose demands he can never possibly meet. When the play opens, Shannon has climbed the hill to the verandah of the hotel run by his longtime friend, Maxine (Julanne ChidiHill), a blunt-spoken widow whose frank assessment of Shannon’s personal flaws and predicaments barely conceals her yearning to bed him. Shannon’s current predicament is an acute one; it’s been discovered by the ladies in his tourist group that he fornicated with Charlotte (Isabella Feliciana), a 16-year-old among their party. It isn’t the first time Shannon has been accused of such behavior; his prior defrocking took place due to a combination of similar acts with members of the congregation along with “blasphemous speech,” which included referring to God himself as a “senile delinquent.”
Sometime later another visitor arrives: Hannah (Jully Lee), herself an itinerant traveling with her grandfather, a 97-year-old poet struggling to compose his final poem. Unlike the brash, take-no-prisoners Maxine, Hannah is soft-spoken and reserved, her ladylike mien belying a desperation now that she and her granddad are down to their last dollar. As portrayed by Lee, Hannah is a woman of great empathy; whereas Maxine’s attraction to Shannon is clearly (albeit not entirely) carnal, the bond Hannah weaves with him is a deeper one of the spirit.
One of the problems with relating to the character of Shannon is the objectionable nature of some of his behaviors, most outstandingly not only his fornication with underage girls but his inability to apologize for it, his dogged insistence, along with his generally misogynistic perspective, that the girl herself is responsible. There is also inherent in the character a kind of malignant narcissism — a turn-off unless it’s modified by charm or humor and/or other qualities that might elicit in the audience feelings of empathy for his pain.
But while there are moments when we see Shanahan’s Reverend as insightful about and moved by Hannah’s plight and her grandfather’s, and while his performance certainly exudes intensity and stamina, these other subtler elements were, at the performance, I attended, wanting.
Likewise Chidi-Hill’s portrayal of Maxine is weighed down by an ongoing series of sexy poses and swiveling limbs, projected in lieu of a sensuality radiating from within and a savoring of life.
Lee’s Hannah — less the wraith that Williams paints her as in his text, but here interpreted to great advantage as a person of silent strength and fortitude — is the production’s anchor, with her culminating scene on stage segueing to the evening’s moving highlight.
Elsewhere Ann Noble lends sharp, scintillating humor to Miss Fellowes, the self-righteous spokesperson for the Bible-belting tourists whom Shannon’s been contracted to lead. Feliciana scores a droll, arresting cameo in the somewhat ignoble role of an obsessive, sex-struck adolescent for whom Shannon is prey. Scenes involving a cadre of German tourists add both color (Denitza Blitznakova’s costumes underscore the characters’ flagrantly hollow personas) and historic dimension as chilly harbingers of the fascism that is taking hold worldwide.
Production elements serve up an attractive framework for the story, its sweltering tropical ambience projected by scenic designer Tesshi Nagakawa’s bamboo edifice with its row cubicles into which the guests can disappear or emerge as the story demands, and its projected silhouette of rain forest foliage. Kaitlin Trimble’s lighting changes add subtle shading, and John Zalewski’s sound likewise lends distinction to the play’s torrid time and place.
Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Court, Pasadena. Fri.-Sat., 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 pm, some Mon., 7:30 pm; thru Oct. 19. https://ci.ovationtix.com/112/production/1213602? Running time: approximately two hours and 35 minutes with an intermission.
