STAGE REVIEW : ‘Iguana’ as Good as Its Words

When Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana” was first produced on Broadway in December, 1961, it was voted Best American Play of the season, and a couple of critics even ventured that it was Williams’ best play.

Such proclamations are dangerously self-serving, but watching and, more to the point perhaps, listening to the revival of this play at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it opened Thursday, one is awed by the sheer beauty and nourishment in the writing.

That is as much a commentary on the devaluation of language in our world as the growing encroachment of image in the theater. (“Bogeyman,” playing next door in the LATC complex, is a case in point.)

This “Iguana,” staged by LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell, has its ups and downs, but shining through them like a beacon is the transforming power of the word. That, and David Selby’s fulgent ability to deliver it in a manic performance as the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, defrocked priest-turned-tour-bus driver, with a weakness for pubescent flesh, who washes up on the terrace of the seedy Costa Verde Hotel in Mexico, to fall apart.

If that were all, “The Night of the Iguana” might satisfy as a spectacular turn for an actor. But Williams had more in mind. As a humanist and poet of the theater, he magnified the play’s crossed purposes by injecting them with elements of heaven and hell.

The year is 1940. The Costa Verde sits on a jungle-covered hilltop overlooking the sea. Its only clientele is a Nazi family of four. At the foot of the hill is a busload of indignant Texas church matrons that Shannon has abandoned in the heat, and the teen-ager among them that he has seduced, precipitating his nervous collapse.

The owner of the Costa Verde is a recently widowed tarantula named Maxine (Camilla Carr) who knows Shannon’s earthy, alcoholic lapses and fosters them. Arriving amid the mayhem is the destitute, itinerant artist Hannah Jelkes (Pamela Gien) with her 97-year-old poet-grandfather (Robert Symonds, as a valiant, dapper gentleman of the old school).

No stranger to despair, Hannah assesses Shannon’s aching, spiritually bankrupt yearnings and offers demure solace. The action becomes the struggle among these forces: man’s magnificent, defiant, foolish torment, trapped between absurdist reality and grandiose aspiration.

Williams’ play transcends naturalism to grasp at considerably more. So we forgive it its cartoonish elements--the clownish Nazis, the self-righteous leader of the tour group, the silly teen-ager whose hysterics may land Shannon a charge of statutory rape--as the burlesque window-dressing needed to offset Shannon’s crisis.

But do those Nazis really have to be painted such an unconvincing shade of lobster red? They are played with martial Aryan glee by Thomas Newman, Anne Gee Byrd, Scott Atkinson and Yohanna Yonas, but do they never change out of their bathing suits? Does that Valkyrie, Hilda (Yonas), ever surrender her zebra inner tube?

And why cast a Chinese actress, June K. Lu (who needs to articulate better), as the uptight Texas virago? It imputes a mildly racist dimension on what was distinctly written as an Ugly Anglo role.

These questions follow us out the door, but are largely obliterated by the memory of Selby’s haggard, stumbling Shannon, a quaking embodiment of flailing principles and jangled nerves.

Gien’s Hannah takes more getting used to. She’s younger and saner than most, but grows in the part to negotiate the dense emotional rapids of the talkative third act with a satisfying grace.

More problematic is Camilla Carr’s Maxine, “Iguana’s” least defined major character. Carr relies heavily on the externals of the role--the slatternly toughness, the sexuality--but hasn’t yet discovered the organic, cruel vulgarity of the woman. A broader, more strident performance, oddly enough, might bridge the gap.

D Martyn Bookwalter has designed a semi-abstract set (for a semi-abstract play?) of totems and fish nets, with individual shuttered rooms that look as if they’re nesting in the trunks of trees. His lighting is expressive, and combines with Michael C. Cousins’ crashing sounds of tropical thunder and rain to make for a spectacular close to the second act.

The balance of the company lends solid support, even if the show as a whole still needs to work out some quirks. But quibbles and the nearly 3 1/2-hour length aside, there is, as someone remarked on leaving the theater, no substitute for good writing.

“The Night of the Iguana,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Nov. 3. $23-$28; (213) 627-5599. Running time: 3 hours, 20 minutes.

‘The Night of the Iguana’

David Selby: Reverend Shannon

Camilla Carr: Maxine Faulk

Pamela Gien: Hannah Jelkes

Robert Symonds: Jonathan Coffin (Nonno)

June K. Lu: Judith Fellowes

Leticia Vasquez: Leticia Vasquez

Alberto Ibarra: Pedro

Albert Michel Jr.: Pancho

Maury Hillstrom: Hank

Thomas Newman: Herr Fahrenkopf

Anne Gee Byrd: Frau Fahrenkopf

Scott Atkinson: Wolfgang

Yohanna Yonas: Hilda

Al Rossi: Jake Latta

Director Bill Bushnell. Co-director Sidney Montz. Playwright Tennessee Williams. Set and lights D Martyn Bookwalter. Costumes Noel Taylor. Original music Asmund Feidje. Sound Michael C. Cousins. Stage manager Nancy Ann Adler.