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[an error occurred while processing this directive] (none) `The Night of the Iguana' Maxine (Andrea Frye, right) comforts the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Howard) in the the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2000 production of Tennessee Williams' `The Night of the Iguana.' Photo by Jennifer Donahoe. "I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable." - Tennessee Williams By John Enders Ashland Daily Tidings Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) wrote some of the most memorable plays of the century, including "The Glass Menagerie" 1945, "A Streetcar Named Desire" 1947, and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" 1955. His central theme: the inescapable loneliness at the heart of human existence. Director Penny Metropulos' presentation of Williams' "The Night of the Iguana" is no exception to exploring this theme. Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon is a wasted soul, a hard-drinking, semi-defrocked preacher-cum-tour group leader wanting nothing more than to escape his miserable life and spend the torrid afternoons in a hammock at the rural inn run by Maxine Faulk. The setting for the entire play is the inn's veranda above the Mexican beach of Puerto Barrio. With a rain forest behind it, it is what Williams described as "among the world's wildest and loveliest populated places." Shannon soon comes face to face with Hannah Jelkes, a New England spinster, and her grandfather, poet Jonathan Coffin, nicknamed Nonno and "97 years young." The two are down hard on their luck, traveling from town to town and paying for their rooms by reciting poems and drawing sketches. Shannon's disreputable behavior with a teen-ager on a tour group of Texas schoolteachers brings him into conflict with the tour leader, Miss Judith Fellowes. Witnessing the long, lonely "Night of the Iguana" are four German tourists enjoying shortwave radio reports of the blitzkrieg of London, two Mexican young inn employees, and one large iguana. Williams visited Mexico in 1940, and the play was developed from a short story that he had written afterward. It premiered as a one-act play in Spoleto, Italy in July, 1959. Williams expanded it into two-acts. After extensive re-writing, "The Night of the Iguana" opened as a full-length play in December, 1961, with Bette Davis as Maxine and Margaret Leighton as Hannah Jelkes, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress. The play was awarded the N.Y. Drama Critics Circle Award, running for 319 performances. A film version, featuring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr, and directed by John Huston, was released in 1964 and put Puerta Vallarta - and the affair between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor - on the map. The original set of "Night of the Iguana," the movie, is now a restaurant on a Vallarta beach. Shannon (played by Richard Howard) is a not-so-drunken fearful, tortured soul afraid of losing his mind, again. Maxine (Andrea Frye) is clingy, seedy and no help to him at all. Fellowes (Catherine Lynn Davis) is tight-lipped, frigid and oh-so-sweetly indignant, while Jelkes (Suzanne Irving) is the mirror image of Shannon: a soul adrift, she with her grandfather, he with his drink and lost morals. Jelkes' grandfather, "Nonno," is a window into the jolly spiritless nature of old age and has-beenness. Director Metropulos, who has been with the OSF since 1994, first as a guest director and later as associate artistic director, has directed some of the Festival's most acclaimed recent productions, including "The Good Person of Szechuan," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Death of a Salesman." She saw the direction of her first Williams play as a delight. To delve deeply into the author's mind, Metropulos and Dramaturg Douglas Lang-worthy found Williams' poems, letters and taped interviews with reporters, including the transcript of an interview with famed journalist Studs Terkel. Metropulos believes that the most important thing about Williams' work is his honesty. "Not everyone is so open, so honest," shesays. "He was no fading flower." Often Williams' depression and alcohol- or drug-induced fits have given him and his work a reputation for meanness, she notes. But that's only one side of this playwright. "We, all of us, have our demons, and he never arrested his," she says. "But he never stopped trying. Williams was lucky he could write," she says. "That's the best of him." And, boy could he write. All in all, before his death by choking in 1983, Williams had left America and the world with a writing legacy of dozens of short screenplays and plays, 25 full-length plays, two novels, 60 short stories, a novella, an autobiography, and more than 100 poems. Williams, who was gay, worked to illuminate the simple starkness of humanity: the desperation and aloneness many feel, the sexual nature of predation, the violent interplay between wasted individuals struggling to survive. No wonder his message resonates in this and the just-past century. "He throws down gauntlets, in a way, for us to confront those fears and connect," Metropulos says. But there is an uplifting side to the man's work, which deals with relationships, the ways people connect, touch each other, intertwine their lives and love and sexual urges and oddities. In doing all that, people "alleviate their loneliness," Metropulos says. "The Night of the Iguana," as it illuminates the people who are at the inn that night, is not sad or lonely or tragic. To the director, it is deeply spiritual. It is human. "I don't think it's sad. It's moving. It's poignant. It's provocative." [an error occurred while processing this directive] (none) [an error occurred while processing this directive] (none) [an error occurred while processing this directive] (none) Ashland Daily Tidings 1661 Siskiyou Blvd. Ashland, OR 97520 Telephone 541-482-3456 © Copyright 2000 Lee Northwest Publishing