The Night of the Iguana – 22 February 2024

Tennessee Williams has an incredibly deep, insightful perspective on the world, and in The Night of the Iguana, he explores a set of characters who are who they are and do not change despite at times desiring to do so. In La Femme Theatre Productions’ off Broadway version, director Emily Mann had a distinct interpretation of the text and focused on the idea that people are like animals in that they cannot be cut free from themselves. Who they are devours them whole and their desires keep them trapped, going through life and aging without really developing.

Without a doubt, the text is brilliant, and the characters are simultaneously odd and highly relatable. Yet I started to get frustrated when everyone’s wants and needs did not exceed the confines of their situations enough to feel like significant obstacles to their fulfillment. These characters were trapped by such simple inhibitions within themselves, and individually each character, each conversation, each story was a fascinating study of what it’s like to be unable to move yourself to make small, easy-to-identify decisions to change your life. But an entire, full-length play comprised only of such characters, having philosophical but ultimately not life-changing conversations, started to feel repetitive, stale, and static. I do not believe the text to be the limiting factor here, but rather the interpretation.

As a whole, the pacing of The Night of the Iguana did not support the dramatic structure of the text. Fights came out of nowhere and resolutions were too quick to be realistic. The vagueness as each character lived the same story started to bleed together, and the audience was in the doldrums. Beowulf Boritt’s set combined beautifully with Jeff Croiter’s lighting design, especially in the first act. But towards the end, when the light stopped changing and everything was static for Willliams’s profound conversation between Hannah (Jean Lichty) and Shannon (Tim Daly), the moment felt drawn out, forced, and repetitive.

I think in a lot of ways, this production missed the mark, both in terms of acting/directing choices and in terms of honoring Tennessee Williams’s intentions about showing characters who remain the same. While I feel the characters were all intended to end up in the same place where they started, there were many opportunities for them to stretch outside of their comfort zones and really imagine what it would be like to have the things they were saying they wanted, to act as if they could live their desires, then to come down from that place realizing that they can’t. Without this arc, without this journey, the scenes and the stories bled together and got lost. The worst part is that the audience, already conditioned by more contemporary pieces for straight plays to be shorter and progress faster, felt stagnant and unmoved; a fair number of people left at intermission, which is always disheartening as appreciation for classics in general seems to be diminishing. I left the theatre feeling that this was a profound missed opportunity to renew theatregoers’ interests in classics beyond Shakespeare.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.