WILLIAMS, Tennessee

The Night of the Iguana

1. Tennessee Williams was born March 26th 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. The family moved to St. Louis. During the Depression he worked in a shoe factory, he did some courses in the University of Iowa in 1938. "The Glass Menagerie", (1945) was his first Broadway success. He produced a string of very successful plays during the fifties; the most popular one is probably "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955). He died in 1983.

2. Tennessee Williams' plays deal in the main with characters who are magnificent failures. There are few heroes in his plays. There is a general sympathy for the different worlds he creates, full of people trying to escape from one trap or another. The only outcome that seems to smooth out events is death. Death and illness form a large part of all his plays, and he uses this focus to bring out his characters' reaction to the ultimate uselessness of all human striving.

3. "NIGHT OF THE IGUANA" was first performed in New York in 1961; it has also been made into a film. It could be described as a typical Williams play. The setting is a rustic Hotel, Costa Verde, overlooking the beach at Puerto Barrio in Mexico during the summer of 1940. All of the action takes place on the wide veranda of this hotel.

        (a) In ACT ONE the characters, all of whom are deficient in some fundamental way, are presented to the audience. First of all there is MAXINE, an American lady, owner of the old hotel, recently widowed, a woman whose whole mind is fixed on self-satisfaction, and who can only feel a vague fondness for outcasts like herself. Then the REVEREND SHANNON appears. He is the central character of the play, a defrocked minister, who is leading a tour of American ladies through Mexico. They are Baptists. He has managed to seduce one of the younger ones. He has been doing this regularly and was defrocked for having sexual relations with a young parishioner. He is the pivotal character of the play, which develops around his problems with his own tempestuous character —prone to hysterics and exaggerated guilt complexes—, and his relationships with the other people in the play. There are two other central characters, Hannah, a middle aged spinster who paints water colours and does sketches of guests in the different hotels to which she brings her grandfather, who is ninety-seven, and struggling to put together his last poem. He was once a minor poet, but has written nothing for twenty years. They are destitute.

During this act Shannon is arguing with his tour group, trying to persuade them to stay at the Costa Verde, even though it is not on their itinerary, and is well off the beaten track. The ladies of the tour are dissatisfied and want to get away from the place, and particularly from Shannon, who is nothing but a fraud to them. Maxine, the owner of the hotel, wants to hang on to Shannon, as a more attractive companion than the young Mexican who works for her. When Hannah appears, ethereal with her ghost-like grandfather, she acts as a balancing point to Shannon's despair, his knowledge of his own incompetence. Maxine agrees to take the couple for the night, and the act concludes with the grandfather, Nonno, reciting the first verse of a new poem he is starting to write, as the sun goes down over the sea.

        (b) ACT TWO develops the link between Hannah, Nonno and Shannon. Hannah has spent a lifetime already looking after her grandfather. He has lived so long that she never got any chance to develop her own life. She treats Shannon with unselfish kindness and he is struck by her "fantastic" quality. She dwells in an unreal world as he does, and at the moment of the play, reality begins to impinge on both of them. Maxine wants Shannon for herself, warning Hannah off him at one stage. This is only to illustrate the wraith-like quality of Hannah, and the fact that she is reaching out beyond herself to help another. Shannon shows an unusual tenderness towards the old grandfather, a pathetic yet attractive figure — full of a wayward selfishness like most of the other characters. All these dilapidated people are shown against a background of a German family who appear on the scene occasionally singing German songs, and listening to news from the Battle of Britain on the radio. Their success, their confidence (the father is a tank-manufacturer), their unashamed sense of dominance contrasts with the failed lives of the Americans. An Iguana is caught by the two Mexicans in the play: he is tied to the posts below the veranda, so as to be fattened and eaten. He is the symbol that names the play: a wild animal captured and tied down, used as a plaything for his captors. All the people in the play are imprisoned by their inadequacies. They cannot break away from their lack of success, from floundering around in the jungle night, like the iguana. Shannon, absorbed in the figure of Hannah and her grandfather, is amazed that someone would want to help him without looking for anything back. He himself is so lost he rushes about continually, and the figure of the dying poet and his granddaughter wandering the world has the effect of involving him in a world as unreal as his own. ACT TWO finishes with a tropical storm, with all the characters in the play on the veranda, behind a sheet of rain which the author seems to use as a means of cooling the tense atmosphere he is building between the characters themselves, as well as a figure of how they are cut off from reality in different ways.

        (c) ACT THREE begins with Shannon writing a letter to his Protestant bishop back home in the States, a letter he has started to write many times just before previous breakdowns. The touring party come to demand the key of the bus, which he refuses to give up. His replacement on the tour has him seized and they take the key from him. He gets hysterical, screams and shouts, and Maxine and her Mexican boys have him tied up to the hammock on the veranda. Shannon clearly enjoys these moments of hysteria, although the realization that he will never lead any more tours anywhere is dawning on him. He is reality mixed with fantasy. He is helped to face the real world through the final conversation with Hannah, in which she both reveals some of his attitudes to himself, and explains with some of her own. He asks her for an account of her love life, and she tells him some episodes fraught with loneliness and sad selfishness on the part of some people she has met on her travels. Earlier he has given her the golden cross he kept as a symbol of his past clerical life. This was after Maxine had explained to Hannah and to Shannon himself, the reasons for his nervous problems.

The final scenario of the play is Nonno getting his very last poem said, just before his death. Shannon is untying the iguana, Nonno calls for his granddaughter, and says the poem in her hearing; she writes it down. It is as if the old man's mind was released just before death to say something pleasantly beautiful. The poem has great simplicity, expressing the fact that the main characters arrive at some kind of peace, there is some salvation somewhere when the storms abate. The poem finishes with:

        "O Courage, could you not as well,

        Select a second place to dwell

        Not only in that golden tree

        But in the frightened heart of me". It is a cry of hope.

4. LITERARY ASSESSMENT

Tennessee Williams always wrote interesting plays. He looks at characters who have something missing in their personalities, and he seeks to discover how they manage in a world that always tramples on inadequate people. In his mind the world has no room for weak characters, and so their struggle for survival becomes a fascinating subject for a play. This would seem to be a common denominator in many great playwrights. Hamlet and Macbeth, for example, are tragically deficient characters. In this particular play of Tennessee Williams, there are no heroically tragic characters in the Shakespeare mould. They were deficient, but with a certain touch of grandeur. The people who come on stage for the Night of the Iguana are all flawed personalties, downgraded people, who would never ever contemplate a heroic act. There seems to be no room anywhere, not even as reference points, for rounded, balanced people. And yet some of Tennessee Williams' characters, such as Hannah, achieve a stature which approaches heroism: that even here there is a certain pointlessness in her existence, looking after an ageing grandfather, waiting for him to give forth his last poem before he dies, penniless at the edge of the jungle.

In this play, as in his others, his characters do move within the clearly defined limits of their personalities. There is little room for growth, only acceptance. Deficiencies are there to be lived with, never overcome. The iguana is released from the rope, but the people seem to remain imprisoned in their given personalities. As a play, that fact makes the drama work quite well, and with Williams' rich control of language, each person presented speaks volumes in a few paragraphs.

He makes exceptionally clever use of one scene, the veranda of the hotel, looking out over the jungle trees onto the ocean in the distance. He has a unique ability to grasp time in his plays. Here it all takes place in an evening, and he makes you conscious of how much can happen in a few hours. His insistence on changing light brings on the storm and the moon and makes them part of the drama, as well as the ever present jungle.

5. MORAL ASSESSMENT

This play is based on what could be called a pagan morality. The writer seems to have little or no belief in God, and so all events in the world are understood in terms of fate and destiny. Each character is landed with their personalities and circumstances, and they have to survive harrowing experiences in their lives, without any ultimate purpose. This means they look for compensations for their empty lives, in dominating one another and in giving in to their weaknesses.

He makes one penetrating reference to Calvary at the central moment of Act III when Shannon is tied up. Hannah tells him he enjoys being trussed up. She says "Who wouldn't like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that's so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon? There's something almost voluptuous in the way you twist and groan in that hammock —no nails, no blood, no death. Isn't that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon?" (p. 302 of the Penguin books, 1976 edition of Cat and other plays.) There are references like that to God, mostly in quite realistic terms. But you always get the impression of some far-off truth that would be wonderful to have as a truth, but that is too good, too fanciful to be true. God is probably somewhere out there, too far away to make much difference.

This probably explains his approach to sexual morality. He uses sexual behaviour as a dramatic ploy, and without being uncouth, he focuses on this topic continually. In "Iguana" he makes an effort to establish a relation between the main character Shannon, and Hannah which is above sexuality: but Hannah is seen as an angelic character part of whose unreality is to be above normal human urges anyway.

So sexuality is usually the mere satisfying of animal instincts and there is little room for a spiritual dimension of the love between husband and wife, though this is often longed for by his characters, longed for like an impossible dream, as impossible to reach as God himself. Sex is a relief from loneliness, an indulgence that is necessary to block out the emptiness of soul.

Williams also suffers the common American prejudice that makes all Mexicans primitive and unhygienic, and therefore very attractive to the puritans whom he tends to regard as the most typical Americans, and from whom he never really breaks free himself.

Once you accept the fact that you are dealing with a play written about pagans who live empty lives, and that for Williams there are no people outside that framework, then his plays are interesting, even if bereft of any real purpose or any real ideals in their portrayals of the human condition.

 

                                                                                                                  T.B. (1993)

 

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