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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