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`Iguana' reveals author's turmoil Photo by Andree Lanthier Hannah Jelkes (Suzanne Irving) steadies Shannon (Richard Howard) after his breakdown in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2000 production of Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana." Penny Metropulos is directing the play, set in Mexico, one of four in the festival's early season. OSF production honors Williams' most intense play By AL REISS ASHLAND -- In Tennessee Williams' play "The Night of the Iguana," a fallen clergyman from the American South, now a failed tour guide in Mexico, says, "It's going to storm tonight -- a terrific electric storm. Then you will see the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon's conception of God Almighty. ... I want to go back to the Church and preach the Gospel of God as Lightning and Thunder. ..." Now playing What: "The Night of the Iguana" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Where: Angus Bowmer Theatre, Ashland When: Periodically through July 9; Sept. 19 through Oct. 29. Next performances are 1:30 p.m. today and Saturday, March 2 and 4 Tickets: $14.50 to $39. Call 482-4331 Note: some adult dialogue and situations The play is one of four in the early season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Presented in the Angus Bowmer Theatre, it represents Williams' questioning of religious values in his own life, through the crisis in Shannon's. Penny Metropulos, director of the OSF production, says, "This was the end of Williams' great popular plays." Dan Isaac, a drama critic and former Ashland resident who has researched Williams' life and career, thinks of it as Williams' "most profound play." "Iguana" went through several phases before emerging as a full-length play in 1961. Williams himself said that it's a poem. Even though the statement might imply a weakness in plotting, the play works on many levels, including plot. Williams puts Shannon into the run-down Costa Verde Hotel in Mexico, in 1940. There, too, are: the members of the bus tour he is leading, made up of 11 school teachers from a Baptist women's college in Texas; a family of German tourists celebrating news of Nazis bombing Britain; Hannah, a spinster artist from New England, and Nonno, her 97-years "young" grandfather. There are also Charlotte, an "almost- 17"-year-old girl on the college tour; and Miss Fellowes, the vindictive woman who leads the tour. She is hostile toward Shannon, accusing him of having had sexual relations with the girl. Besides the guests are Maxine, the widow who owns the faded hotel; Pedro and Pancho, two hotel employees; a bus driver, and another employee of the tour company; and the iguana, a lizard brought to the hotel by Pedro and Pancho, who intend to eat it. A central Williams theme is the conflict between illusion and reality. Shannon often uses the word "fantastic." He doesn't want to leave the veranda of the hotel because, in the darkness, "the spook" is pursuing him. He explains to Hannah, "When you live on the fantastic level ... but have got to operate on the realistic level, that's when you're spooked. ..." Shannon, Hannah and her grandfather appear to be at the end of their metaphoric ropes. The iguana, tethered under the veranda, certainly is -- realistically. The lizard becomes a metaphor of the humans' situations. Shannon feels that he is being crucified, mainly by the women in his life. Hannah tells him that he wants to be, and that it is less painful to be crucified in a hammock, bound with ropes, than on a cross, with nails. In the festival production Richard Howard plays Shannon. Suzanne Irving is Hannah. An extended dialogue between them, sometimes as turbulent as the storm around them, is the heart of the play. Their performances draw the audience into the lives of the characters. These introspective moments are stronger in Howard's performance than are his emotional outbursts, which belong more to the tour guide about to be fired than to the minister about to be defrocked. Shannon and Hannah combine moments of cross-examination with self-revealing flashes. As Hannah, Irving recalls two episodes of "love" in her spinster life. Shannon, disclaiming the Western God of anger and fury, calls her, "Miss thin-standing-up female-Buddha," indicating his (and Williams') preoccupation with Eastern religion. Near the end of the play Hannah asks a question of the Almighty, and receives an answer. The worldly wise Maxine (Andrea Frye) sees through Hannah, an impoverished sketch-artist living from day-to-day, leading her aged grandfather through life for the public sympathy he will bring her. Grandfather, Nonno (Sandy McCallum), was recognized as a minor poet before World War I, but he hasn't written a poem in 20 years. In the play he is often seen behind a scrim, working on a poem, an effort that has occupied much of his life. The work is his tether, tying him to his mortal coil. Catherine Lynn Davis plays Miss Fellowes, drawn by Williams in narrow dimensions. True to the intended character, Davis plays her as the Wicked Witch of the Southwest. Maxine (Frye), two weeks a widow, doesn't mourn her older husband, cold before he was dead. She tries to reassure herself of her sexual allure by inviting Shannon to "swim in liquid moonlight." Metropulos' direction opens the play with a wordless prologue, showing Shannon in a white linen suit, alone, in a single circle of light, surrounded by a tangle of twisted shadows, amid jungle sounds; a powerful metaphor of the play. Through the rising storm, in action and subtext, the play builds to a stunning first-act curtain. The drama is lightened with comedy, some of it bitter, and augmented by spectacular special effects and an unseen marimba band. With its production, the festival honors a great historic American dramatist writing at the height of his powers. It has presented other Williams works over many years, but seldom with the intensity achieved in this one. (Al Reiss is a free-lance writer and critic living in Jacksonville.) Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA