The Night of the Iguana (1961). Content and Description

The Night of the Iguana was Williams’s last great critical and commercial success. The play debuted at Broadway’s Royal Theatre on December 28, 1961, running for 316 performances and earning Williams his fourth Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Beginning as a short story Williams sketched in 1940 while staying at the Hotel Costa Verde outside Acapulco, Mexico, the play evolved over a 20-year period.

Although the final script bore little resemblance to the early drafts, Williams retained the locale and time that inspired the story. Set during the first stages of World War II, Iguana explores individual desperation in one of history’s most anxious periods. Located across the ocean from the war’s European theater, the story reminds us that human anguish arises not only out of grave but also out of banal circumstances.

The story centers on Dr. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked Episcopalian-priest-turned-low-rent- vacation-tour-guide. Leading a group of schoolteachers from an all-female Baptist school in rural Texas, Shannon abandons the itinerary midway through the trip, hoping to recuperate from physical and psychological exhaustion. The action picks up when the bewildered Shannon staggers into the Costa Verde Hotel outside Puerto Barrio, Mexico, where he knows the proprietor, Maxine Faulk. After discovering Maxine’s husband has recently died, Shannon confesses to having slept with Charlotte Goodall, a 16-year-old student tagging along with the teachers.

By the time Shannon arrives on Maxine’s verandah, he has become the target of the trip leader Judith Fellowes’s vitriol and the subject of the teachers’ gossip. “At the end of his rope,” Shannon confiscates the bus key and forces the women to stay at the Costa Verde. During the confusion, Hannah Jelkes emerges from the jungle with her wheelchair-bound 97-year- old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (Nono), a semi- famous minor poet. Immediately attracted to Hannah, Shannon convinces Maxine to take them in despite their inability to pay. That evening, after rebuffing Charlotte’s marriage overtures and changing into his clerical outfit to demonstrate his piety, Shannon strikes up a conversation with Hannah, who sketches him as he discusses the church’s reasons for barring him from his own parish (fornication and heresy).

An alternate tour conductor arrives, fires Shannon, forcibly takes the ignition key, and leads the ladies back to the bus. Sensing her victory, Miss Fellowes admonishes Shannon a final time. The completeness of his failure sinking in—“there’s nothing lower than Blake Tours”—Shannon grows hysterical, prompting Maxine to have him tied down in a hammock as a precautionary measure. While bound, he has another profound conversation with Hannah, who diagnoses Shannon’s problem as “the oldest one in the world—the need to believe in something or in someone—almost anyone—almost anything . . . something.” Finally, Shannon frees himself.

After Hannah rebuffs his sexual advances, he commits a last gesture of goodwill, freeing an iguana that has been tied to a cactus for the duration of the play. Upon the creature’s release, Nono completes his final poem. The play concludes on a bittersweet note. Shannon agrees to help Maxine manage the hotel, thereby releasing him from his spiritual and religious bonds. As they walk to the beach for a night swim in the “liquid moonlight,” Nono gently dies, leaving Hannah completely alone.

A turning point in Williams’s career, The Night of the Iguana both affirms and departs from his earlier work. All three central figures—Shannon, Maxine, and Hannah—are outsiders who, despite weakness and repulsive conduct, have an inner humanity that redeems them. As are many of Williams’s characters, most notably Blanche Dubois (in A Streetcar Named Desire), Shannon is pulled between spiritual fulfillment and carnal desire. The quest for freedom, particularly freedom from constrictive sexual norms, drives Shannon’s nervous breakdown and self- centered behavior. Yet, the play diverges from Williams’s earlier work by closing on an optimistic note.

Although the play ends with a death, Nono finishes his poem prior to dying, thereby experiencing a dual release, the first from the agony of artistic creation, the second from age-induced pain and dementia. By agreeing to stay with the lusty Maxine, Shannon frees himself from his religious guilt. As does the iguana, “one of God’s creatures at the end of the rope,” Nono and Shannon find liberation from the ropes that bind them. Hannah’s loneliness is initially disturbing, but if we understand her as a symbol of the spiritual life, one devoid of physical human contact, her isolation is Shannon’s gain—and presumably our own.

In an interview Williams gave the year after Iguana premiered, he claimed he sought to show “how to live beyond despair and still live” (Funke and Booth 72). The play’s timing was appropriate. His relationship with Frank Merlo in shambles, his career jeopardized by protests and claims of indecency, Williams used Iguana to work through his own despair. He also used the play to respond to critics who found his works unsavory. Hannah’s line “I don’t judge people, I draw them” seems aimed both at Shannon’s and at Williams’s detractors. Williams remained adamant that art ought to expose humanity’s seedier side, rather than glossing over it or imagining it out of existence.

Shannon offers an impassioned plea for understanding on the same grounds. In his final confrontation with Miss Fellowes, Shannon justifies his sexual improprieties in the same way Williams might justify his art: “I haven’t stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!—the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched.

And none of them will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!” Whether it was Stanley Kowalski’s New Orleans apartment in A Streetcar Named Desire or Jabe Torrance’s rural Mississippi dry goods store in Orpheus Descending, Williams guided audiences “willing to see” through some of the most colorful and disturbing “underworlds” ever staged in American theaters. In the process of bringing these locales to life, Williams revealed the most colorful and disturbing underworld of all: the human psyche.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. While staying at the Hotel Costa Verde in 1940, Williams reportedly met Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, novelist, and playwright. Both men were fascinated by human desperation and the desire for freedom. Read Sartre’s play No Exit and compare it with The Night of the Iguana. Do you think Williams would agree with Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people”?

2. Many critics have noted the symbolic overtones of the play’s two central female characters, Hannah and Maxine, who they argue represent Shannon’s pull toward the spiritual (Hannah) and the carnal (Maxine). Are these symbolic representations accurate? If so, does Williams reduce these women to objects, mere instruments for a man’s psychic recovery?

3. Discuss Shannon’s assessment that we “live on two levels. . . , the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really.” What does he mean by “fantastic” and “realistic”? What do you make of Hannah’s reply, that the fantastic and realistic levels are equally “real”? How is the play itself simultaneously fantastic and realistic?