Theater: The Violated Heart

The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. The veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel is bare, but it steams with heat. It is like a raft in the green sea of the Mexican jungle, a vision of the end of the world for people at the end of their rope. Gradually, a quartet of life's castaways assembles. Maxine Faulk (Bette Davis) is the recently widowed proprietor of the hotel, a spitfire sensualist who regards her unbuttoned-to-the-waist body as her soul. T. Lawrence Shannon (Patrick O'Neal) is an alcoholic, defrocked minister who herds lady-tourists off the guidebook route, but is himself spooked by bottomless guilt. Hannah Jelkes (Margaret Leighton) is a Nantucket spinster of nearly 40 who does portrait sketches to eke out a precariously transient existence, but all of her emotional assets are banked with her 97-year-old grandfather, Nonno. Billed as "the world's oldest living and practicing poet," Nonno (Alan Webb) gives poetry readings and wears the stiff white coffin of great age with gallantry as he wrestles with his failing memory to complete a new poem.

What happens to these characters in Iguana is less important than what has happened to them in the past. They must cope with defeated dreams, not future hopes. The play is fragmented, but the theme is whole. It is the theme that has always possessed Williams—the violated heart—violation by repression, starvation, brutalization, isolation. A brooding sense of aloneness and man's yearning need for human contact is uppermost in Iguana. After the empty self-parody of Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana restores to playgoers the Williams who can create a poetry of mood, language, character and imagination as elemental as earth, air, fire and water. This is perhaps the wisest play he has ever written.

The iguana of the title is a giant lizard leashed under the veranda and clawing for its freedom—just as Shannon, the defrocked minister, is roped to a hammock during a mental crackup. Shannon and Hannah, the spinster, dominate the play, and break through to each other as they struggle with fetters of body and spirit. He tells her how he was locked out of his church for "fornication and heresy—in the same week." His revenge: loveless lecheries with teen-age girls, one of whom (Lane Bradbury) claws at his door with embarrassing anguish. Hannah tells him of pathetic fingertip brushes with love. Touched by their mutual need, Shannon asks if they might not make a go of life together. It is Hannah's kindness to be cruel. "Accept whatever situation you cannot improve," she has told him, and releases him to the zesty affections of the Widow Faulk. The moral: human nature is a constant, not a variable, and love, like water, seeks its own level.