One of the undiluted pleasures of the Bicentennial year has been the multiple revivals of the plays of Tennessee Williams. The best of these dramas pos sess poetic eloquence, humanistic compassion and arresting vitality. It is to be hoped that one of these years the judges in Stockholm will confer upon Williams the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been accorded to only one U.S. play wright, Eugene O'Neill.

If the production of The Night of the Iguana now at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater lacks the luminosity of the 1962 original, it is admirable in its own right, with fresh shadings of interpretation. Four castaways at the end of the frayed rope of existence are thrown together on the steaming veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel in the deep-green sea of the Mexican jungle. At its core, the play asks whether they have been for gotten by God, cursed by God, stand in any hope of God's grace or whether God exists at all.

Each of the chief characters has a gallant last-ditch tenacity that is the mark of Williams' people. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Chamberlain) is a defrocked minister with a penchant for teen-age girls. The hotel proprietor, Maxine Faulk (Sylvia Miles), fancies young Mexican beachboys. The guardians of the spirit as opposed to the flesh are Hannah Jelkes (Dorothy McGuire), a Nantucket spinster, and her ancient 97-year-old poet grandfather Nonno (William Roerick), on whom Hannah's abiding love and care are centered.

At the heart of the play, Chamberlain captures the self-lacerating torment of Shannon, and McGuire the innate goodness of Hannah, but both are some what out of their depth where the play itself becomes deeper in certain late scenes and speeches that border on mys tical transcendence.

By Vila Hegyl Swisher
After Dark March 1976

Holed up in his dressing room on the eve of opening The Night of Iguana at L.A.’s Music Center, Richard Chamberlain wrestled with the unpriestly soul of former Episcopalian priest T. Lawrence Shannon.

Out front, in the dark depths of the Ahmanson Theater, meticulous director Joseph Hardy masterminded a technical rehearsal of the drama.

Separately but equally, both director and actor toasted Tennessee Williams for the same thing: elevating the theater with his plays.

“There is nothing prosaic about Williams,” Joe Hardy said with the authority of a prodigious reader of scripts.  “And he’s not afraid to make his characters bigger than life.  Iguana has things to say about the human condition, and in Williams’ words they’re said with—with metaphorical flair.

“The character Shannon lets us know what Williams feels about God. And about theology.  What he feels about living.  About sexuality as opposed to the lack of it...We love listening to Williams’ extraordinary use of vocabulary because what he says has more juice in it than what we hear in movies or from the television screen or in most plays.”

In his dressing room, before simmering down for rehearsal, Chamberlain spun a variation on the same theme.  “The way I find out about a playwright is to act in one of his plays. What I’m finding out right now is that Williams writes incredibly complex characters, and what they have to say echoes rather than states their feelings.  Echoes them with wonderful things to say in the most sayable ways—all very much in touch with what he implies his characters feel.

“It makes a uniquely rich mixture.  Very difficult, too, with a character as complicated as Shannon.  But that’s the challenge.  I think I’ll find the character not in any single great burst of light, but in several small bursts.”

Part 2

Chamberlain did, of course, find the character.  He reached deeper and deeper into the guts into the guts of the ex-Reverend Shannon who had given up trying to serve the God of his church and given in to the forces of his own nature.  He had known conflict—starkly sacred and rowdily profane—with both. 

The salvation he might have attained came in the person of spinster Hannah Jelkes, exquisitely portrayed by Dorothy McGuire...Unerringly, McGuire brought Hannah her full measure of innocence and wisdom...

Always to be remembered for his highly effective underplaying, Raymond Massey was frail and pallid as Hannah’s nonagenarian grandfather-poet.  Another stellar personality in the cast was Eleanor Parker, who touched only superficially the character of the tough-fibered, recently widowed innkeeper in the remote Mexican village where Night of the Iguana takes place.  H.R. Poindexer flooded his lush tropical hotel set with lush tropical lighting of what looked like perpetual night.  Joseph Hardy’s scrupulous direction served Williams with subtle simplicity.  He imposed no self-serving directorial effects, concentrating instead on an objective approach to the playwright’s eloquent drama.

Part 3

As director—and he has been directing since he was seventeen or eighteen years old—Joe Hardy aims “to get across whatever a writer has to say”.  He endorsed Richard Chamberlain’s words, pointing out that “Tennessee Williams says such important things in Iguana. About how, ultimately, we can look at and conduct ourselves when we’re at the end of our rope.

“My first allegiance—and my actors’ too—must be to the writer. I’m not interested in actors who just want to unfurl their egos.  But,” knocking wood, “I’ve never had that problem with any actor.

“An actor’s idiosyncrasies are a different matter.  I neither ignore them nor work around them.  I USE them.  In part, those idiosyncrasies are what make some actors stars.  They have found a way to put their talents and their personalities together, a way to make themselves distinct from anyone else.  If they’re well cast and they don’t go against the characters they play, they can use what is their own to bring those characters to life.”

He shook his head.  “However, I don’t know how you cope with actors who are hopelessly miscast or for some other reason can’t bring their assigned characters to life.  I guess you either fire them—or you do a different play.

Part 4

“When people say a play is well directed, they usually mean that the actors didn’t bump into each other or that they spoke loud enough to be heard or that they knew where to sit.  Direction really beings with and is defined by the concept of a play in toto.  The good director will always have a concept that works.  If, within that concept, there are bad performances, but the play comes off, it can still be considered well directed.  Also, if there are brilliant performances in a play, it may well be that the actors are indeed brilliant—but they wouldn’t have gotten there if they had not been helped by the director.”

Chamberlain concurs.  “I think every director creates his own atmosphere around a play.”  The star was emphatic. “That’s really his main job.  You simply cannot act in a vacuum with the other actors.  You must act within the atmosphere the director creates.  What you do is effective only if the director makes it effective.

“I did King Richard the Second in Seattle, with Duncan Ross directing, and I did Richard here in Los Angeles, with Jonathan Miller directing. Duncan Ross’ was a very traditional, very sympathetic approach.  Both he and I LIKED Richard the man.  Jonathan Miller DIDN’T like Richard the man.  He liked Bollingbroke.

“It was a challenge for me to make a totally different character with the same words.  At times it was very hard, but I wanted it to work, and I think it did. The two Richards were completely dissimilar. Both were mine, but still one was Duncan’s and one Jonathan’s.  It seems to me,” he ventured, “the actor often gets credit for what the director originates.

Part 5

“I’d like to do some directing myself—start with directing scenes, perhaps in my drama coach Vincent Chase’s workshop.  Besides, that, my own college—Pomona—wants me to do a project.  That’s how I hope to work my way into directing.  I’d like to try my hand at something “classical”, his inflection put quotation marks around the word, “and something way out, too.”

So much for writers’, directors’, and actors’ contributions to the living, breathing theater according to Joseph Hardy and Richard Chamberlain.  What about the audiences?  Chamberlain had a quick answer.

“Doing Richard,” he said, “I could always tell when I was communicating with them and when I wasn’t.  I knew when they were with me and when they weren’t.  When we were going someplace together and when I was just babbling onstage and when they were off in their own thoughts, I could tell.

“But this thing of ‘breathing together’—audience and actor—affects you enormously.  That’s it.  That’s the trip.  That’s the whole trip in the theater.  That’s flying. It’s great.”

Viola Hegyl Swisher
After Dark
March 1976 

1976-1977 23rd Drama Desk Awards
Outstanding Actor - Play
Richard Chamberlain - The Night of the Iguana

Outstanding Actress - Play
Dorothy McGuire - The Night of the Iguana