Emmy nominee Tim Daly and Tony winner Daphne Rubin-Vega star in new production of The Night of the Iguana (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday-Sunday through February 25, $81-$161
iguanaplaynyc.com
On “Night of the Iguana,” from her last album, 2007’s Shine, Joni Mitchell sings, “The tour bus came yesterday / The driver’s a mess today / It’s a dump of a destiny / But it’s got a view . . . / Now the kid in the see-through blouse / Is moving in hard on his holy vows . . . / Since the preacher’s not dead / Dead drunk will have to do!”
Tennessee Williams’s 1961 play, The Night of the Iguana, has always attracted star power. It began as a 1948 short story, then developed from a one-act to a two-act to a 1961 three-act Tony-nominated play starring Patrick O’Neal, Bette Davis, and Margaret Leighton, followed by a 1964 John Huston film with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr.
The play is now back in a messy revival at the Signature Center from La Femme Productions that makes it clear why the show has not previously been performed in New York City this century: It’s not very good.
Directed by Emily Mann, the show centers on Rev. Shannon (Tim Daly), a defrocked priest who is now an alcoholic tour guide exhausted with life. It’s the summer of 1940, and he brings his busload of Texas Baptist female schoolteachers to the ramshackle Costa Verde Hotel in Acapulco, run by recent widow Maxine Faulk (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who is more than ready to get back in the action. The leader of the teachers, Judith Fellowes (Lea DeLaria), is angry at the shoddy tour while also trying to keep the teenage Charlotte (Carmen Berkeley) away from Shannon. Also at the hotel are aging poet Jonathan Coffin (Austin Pendleton) and his granddaughter, Hannah (Jean Lichty), who is caring for him; Pedro (Bradley James Tejeda) and Pancho (Dan Teixeira), who work for Maxine; and Frau Fahrenkopf (Alena Acker) and Herr Fahrenkopf (Michael Leigh Cook), a pair of Nazis traipsing around the place. Shannon has the bus keys, so Hank, the bus driver (Eliud Garcia Kauffman), can’t take off without the guide, who might be replaced by his colleague Jake (Keith Randolph Smith).
The Night of the Iguana takes place at a ramshackle Acapulco hotel (photo by Joan Marcus)
It’s a hot and sweaty day, but the play is cold and distant. The actors feel like they’re in different shows, never forming a solid whole. Beowulf Boritt’s invitingly decrepit set is wasted.
The Night of the Iguana came at the end of Williams’s most fertile period, the fifteen years in which he wrote The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth. It was part of a downward spiral of poorly reviewed and attended shows that still attracted big stars but often had to cut their runs short. The Night of the Iguana is one of those Williams plays that everyone has heard of but does not live up to the hype.
Mitchell’s lines capture it best: “The night is so fragrant / These women so flagrant / They could make him a vagrant / With the flick of a shawl. / The devil’s in sweet sixteen / The widow’s good looking but she gets mean / He’s burning like Augustine / With no help from God at all.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]