TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
THE NIGHT
OF THE
IGUANA
INTRODUCTION BY
DOUG WRIGHT
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
CONTENTS
Introduction by Doug Wright: “Uncle Tennessee”
The Night of the Iguana
“Acts of Grace” by Kenneth Holditch
“A Summer of Discovery” by Tennessee Williams
“The Night of the Iguana,” the short story
Chronology
INTRODUCTION: UNCLE TENNESSEE
My mother had a headache, and so I came to know the work of Tennessee Williams.
Dallas, Texas, is a more sophisticated city now, but in 1974 it was still a cultural backwater, and my parents were absolutely vigilant about exposing us to the intermittent art that came our way. The local university hosted an annual subscription series: for a modest fee, you could attend lectures, concerts, literary readings, and plays throughout the year. Eagerly, my parents joined.
Subscription nights were very special indeed. My mother would apply lipstick (something she rarely did), my father would come home from his law office on the early side, and together they’d leave my siblings and me in the company of our elderly babysitter, who’d turn on the TV, pop some Jiffy-Pop, and pray for the best. The next morning over breakfast, Mom and Dad would regale us with tales of PDQ Bach and his hilarious piano, or recount the thrill of hearing Garson Kanin read from one of his novels.
But one evening in the fall of my twelfth year, my mother announced that she was feeling peaked; it was one of her sinus headaches. That meant that my father was saddled with an extra ticket. He could go by himself, or recruit one of the children. My brother was more interested in his model planes than art with a capital “A,” and my sister was too young to sit still for two hours, so I was drafted.
Of course, I’d been to the theater before. I’d seen children’s fare at the Junior Player’s Guild, ranging from Rumpelstiltskin to Frog and Toad, and I knew Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by heart. I’d even been to a grown-up play: Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse.
But if my parents had known the bill that evening, they might have been more circumspect. After all, I was at an impressionable age. Still, they were progressive people, and I’m sure they reasoned that a night spent in the presence of a Great American Drama—any Great American Drama—was preferable to one in front of the idiot box. Why shouldn’t they expose me to the canon early? It’s never too early, is it, to instill a life-long love of literature? And that’s how I came to see a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
I don’t recall the name of the theater company. I don’t recall the cast. In truth, I don’t know if it was a professional or an amateur production.
What do I remember? Decades later, I can still recall the image of Blanche, pristine in white gloves, entering the lurid world of the French Quarter as a jazz saxophonist plaintively wails in the night. I can’t forget Stanley, crudely handsome, his chest bare, strutting about the stage like a prizefighter in a red silk robe that clung to his physique like Saran-Wrap. (It was the first time I’d seen a man as lovingly eroticized as the Playboy Bunnies I’d glanced at the drugstore newsstand; it mesmerized and terrified me at the same time.) Echoing in my ears, I can still hear the horrible cry of “Fire! Fire!” as our heroine, her hair now wild and loose, and her prim suit replaced by a disheveled kimono, tries to incite and suppress potential rape.
Most of all, I remember hearing music as recognizable and singular as Gershwin or Mozart, with as distinct and enduring a melody. But it wasn’t born of instruments; it was borne of words. It was the same vernacular my grandmother used when I visited her in Springfield, Missouri (“You’ve such fragile, fair skin for a little boy,” she’d say, or “It’s the last dress I’m ever going to buy, pale peach, to match the lining of my casket”), but elevated to the level of poetry. It wasn’t naturalistic; it was somehow truer. It conveyed the terrors and the pleasures of life with greater acuity than spontaneous speech ever could. And though the play was performed in a darkened theater for hundreds of spectators, I felt instead that it had been whispered in my ear by the author, imparted as a delicious and mortifying secret that only the two of us shared.
When I left the theater that night, there were three people in my father’s navy-blue Lincoln Continental. Dad was in the driver’s seat, I was next to him, and perched in the back, invisible except to me, sat a figure in a Panama hat and crumpled linen suit, with the slightest hint of liquor on his breath. During the play, he’d slyly implicated himself in my life; I knew he wasn’t leaving anytime soon. He caught my glance in the rearview mirror. The wicked twinkle in his eye and the sad, wise cackle when he laughed carried a promise: he was my new Uncle. He would teach me all the reckless, impolite truths about life no one else in the confines of my hometown possibly could. Some would be salacious. Others would be too moving, too profound to bear. All of them would be well beyond the purview of my mom and dad.
Later that week when our art teacher at school assigned dioramas, I took a shoebox, doll furniture from my sister, and scraps of fabric from mother’s sewing box, and built my own model of the Kowalski residence, complete with tiny beer bottles and a Chinese lantern fashioned from tissue paper. That same week, I stole an old bathrobe of my mother’s and a stringy blonde wig from our box of Halloween costumes, and put them on, so that I could intone tragically before the mirror, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” When Mother poured me a soda pop one day after school, I flashed a coy smile and inquired coquettishly in my best antebellum drawl, “Is this . . . just Coke?” She just looked at me, baffled.
The next Saturday morning, when Mom took us on our weekly trip to the Public Library, I forsook the children’s section. It’s as if I heard Tennessee’s velvety voice, urging me, “Over here. That’s right. Come on over to Modern Drama instead.” Stealthily, I crept past Ramona the Pest and The Hardy Boys, and into terra incognita: the plush, carpeted splendor of the adult wing. Plays were in the back, perpendicular to the wall, where no one would notice a gawky pre-adolescent sneaking his first peek at the farm-fed athletes of William Inge and the pensive, doomed women of Eugene O’Neill.
Uncle Tennessee had his own shelf, bowing in the middle under the weight of his plays. Each hardcover was alluring to me, as irresistible as Pandora’s Box. What would I find inside? Hysterical spinsters, punitive daddies, achingly beautiful, damaged young men, bawdy widows, broken souls, redemption, damnation, and language as potent as laudanum or absinthe.
Despite the disapproving glare of the librarian, over the next few months, I pored through play after play. One weekend, it was The Glass Menagerie with tremulous Laura, her omnivorous mother, and the illusory promise of the Gentleman Caller. The next, it was Orpheus Descending, with Lady and Val locked in their fateful, erotic dance. Other kids at school knew the defensive line-up of the Dallas Cowboys; I could recite from memory the original production team of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Was I precocious enough to understand everything I’d read? Certainly not. The more experimental work in particular (Camino Real and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel) might as well have been rendered in hieroglyphs. It didn’t matter; to me, they were sacred texts and like all such volumes, their inscrutability was part of their allure.
When I ran out of plays, I turned to the short stories and the novels. Finally, brazenly, I attacked his autobiography. Critically derided as distastefully confessional, I found it purgative. His frank descriptions of male beauty, like the Canadian dancer Kip, whom he met on the beaches of Provincetown, were liberating. His tempestuous relationship with Frank
Merlo felt like the first authentic love story I’d ever read. And the occasional night he spent in the arms of a one-night trick or hustler echoed the loneliness, the disenfranchisement, I already felt as a closeted gay kid in a very conservative state. In their candor and their heartache, his memoirs allowed me to confront my own burgeoning desire.
One evening when I was about fifteen, I noticed in the television listings that the Late Movie was a film adaptation of a Williams play I hadn’t read. Its title: The Night of the Iguana. (My cousin Alan in Lubbock had an iguana that he’d carted up from a fraternity vacation to Mexico as a pet for a brief time. One day it escaped the aquarium where he kept it, and disappeared between the walls of the house. My Aunt Marylouise lived in terror of its sudden, unexpected resurgence through a vent or toilet. Suffice it to say, Williams’s title bristled with promise.)
I had to watch this movie, but how? It wasn’t airing until long after my bedtime. I knew what I had to do: wake up in the middle of the night, sneak past my slumbering brother, and barricade myself in the den, keeping the volume low so my parents wouldn’t stir downstairs. Finally, the hour arrived. Alone in the dark, I turned on the set. The credits began to flicker in glorious black and white, and soon I was engulfed in the story of a group of charismatic misfits traveling through Puerto Barrio, Mexico.
I’ll leave it to the critics and the literary theorists to discuss the abundant symbolism in Iguana, its place in Williams’s oeuvre, its thematic intent, its impact on the Broadway season of 1961, and its relevance to contemporary culture. I can only speak about one thing: its impact on the adolescent mind of one particular boy, splayed on his rec room couch, late one night circa 1977. Once again, my dear uncle, as reliable as he was fictive, articulated to me the formative truths that no one else in my life dared to name.
Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon is the hero of the play; he’s a defrocked preacher leading a bevy of Texas harpies through Mexico on a guided tour. He may have seemed like an exotic character to viewers less seasoned than me, but I pegged him right away. Growing up in the Southwest, I’d known plenty of clergymen torn between an unyielding belief in a punitive God, and an insatiable appetite for sex. If you were old enough to attend church, you were old enough to know about scandal. I understood, too, how he was both perpetrator and victim of his own stringent religion. He couldn’t forgive himself for the tawdry affairs that had lead him to the brink of ruin. Self-recrimination was something I knew well. As a child, I spent many nights cowering under my bed sheets, with a flashlight and Bible in hand, reading feverishly in an effort to ward off my own homosexuality. (My parents were far from zealots, but in our community, fundamentalism was as pervasive as cicadas in June.)
I also recognized Miss Judith Fellowes and her brigade of Texas ladies. They might’ve been my elementary school teachers, prim ladies in sensible shoes and shellacked hair, who craved adventure but not inconvenience. (Years later, when I finally saw Iguana staged, I was heartsick to learn that they were John Huston’s invention for the film, and were only referenced in the play itself.) These women are blind to their own hypocrisy; they crave a handsome, attentive guide, who will flirt with them incessantly, without ever revealing a vestige of sexuality in his personal life. I’d seen the same hungry look in the suburban mothers who clamored around our coach at junior high. (Rumor has it that Coach Nevermind subsequently lost his job for bedding down with a student; shades of the Reverend Shannon indeed!)
Even embodied by glamour-puss Ava Gardner, the character of Maxine Faulk was no mystery. I’d seen plenty of blowsy, over-ripe gals like her, who tousled their hair, hugged you too tight, and laughed deep down in their throats, like kitchen disposals. She reminded me of the waitresses at the Lucas B&B Diner, who’d flirt with me outrageously, exclaiming, “I’ve finally found Mr. Right!” as they topped my apple pie with an extra wedge of cheddar cheese. (A gawky, slightly effeminate boy like me made for an irresistible target.)
Only the spinster Hannah Jelkes was unlike anyone I had ever met. Traveling selflessly with her aging grandfather, living off the mercy of tourists who buy her sketch portraits, bereft of love but seemingly not made bitter by its absence, she was a complete enigma to me. I had no frame of reference, no ready categorization for her. Yet, she offered me something indispensable.
Near the play’s climax, she finds herself locked in an all-night battle of ideological will with the fallen preacher. He’s grilling her mercilessly about the lack of romance in her life, and she’s driven to recount a brief, abortive affair with an Australian salesman. The Reverend judges their encounter as sordid, and asks her pointedly if she was disgusted. Her answer is simple, but startling in its humanity; she tells him “nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent.”
When I heard those words, I felt a surge of sudden, unexpected tears. Her theology was far more empathetic than the minister’s. That sounded like the kind of religion I could actually embrace, and yet I’d never heard it in church; I learned it from the midnight movie. In the person of Miss Jelkes, Tennessee Williams offered a gentle corrective to the mendacity, and provincialism, that so readily masqueraded as religious faith in my youth.
And Hannah Jelkes wasn’t even clergy. No, she was something greater: an artist. In Williams’s world, a portraitist with a poet father is a more reliable conduit for truth than a misguided man of God. Art, he suggests, is the closest thing we have to a collective conscience, far more than mere theology.
Now Uncle Tennessee had, to say the least, a checkered reputation. Especially in his later years, the world came to regard him as louche, even decadent; self-satisfied moralists clucked that his sorry decline was the natural result of his overindulgence and aberrant sexuality. But make no mistake about it: he introduced me to grace. And by that I mean grace in the liturgical sense: the spirit of God as it operates in people to ennoble and strengthen them. I’m not religious per se but when I have divined God’s presence, it’s always been in a theater, and never more so than when I am watching a Williams play. When Blanche in Streetcar gasps, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly,” she might as well be referring to any number of epiphanic moments in the playwright’s own work: when Jim christens Laura’s disease “blue roses” in Menagerie or Serafina gets a second chance at love with Alvaro in The Rose Tattoo.
When Hannah and Shannon conspire to set the chained iguana under the porch free, I felt strangely liberated, too. I didn’t understand the metaphor, not fully, but I knew that I could break loose from the confines of my family and my town, and forge my own future in the comparative wild, among my own kind: school on the radical East Coast, and an eventual move to that fabled Bohemia, New York City.
Years have passed, and now I am a professional playwright, if such a profession still exists. Many of my colleagues, Lanford Wilson and Edward Albee among others, actually knew Tennessee. I never shook his hand, or saw him passing on the street, or even penned a fan letter. I only have the imaginary uncle in the backseat. But I am not alone; I think every working American playwright claims a certain kinship to Williams. We write alongside him; he is our shared history.
But the debt I owe him is more than just collegial. I was a gay boy in the mid-seventies in Texas who wanted to write plays; I had no role models. Dallas had stayed mired in the Eisenhower fifties for most of my childhood; in our cloistered state of conservative denial, we’d somehow missed Vietnam, Stonewall, and the martyrdom of Harvey Milk. Even now, I thank God that my phantom uncle reached out across a university stage, through a library bookshelf, to take me by the hand. He had his imperfections, true; the wounds inflicted upon him by his family’s baroque pathology, and the cruel age in which he lived. But he rose above them to achieve the expansive, generous and forgiving view of mankind that Christianity so often teaches and so rarely achieves. He was my first tutor in the fragility, the wonder, and the maddening contradictions of the human heart.
My partner David and I frequently spend our summers in Provincetown, where
Williams enjoyed some of the most productive writing months of his life. Each year, I pay my own tiny homage to him; I visit a small photograph that hangs in the Little Bar of the Atlantic Guest House on Masonic Place, where he allegedly completed an early draft of The Glass Menagerie. The snapshot is black and white, and a bit grainy, but exuberant all the same: it shows Williams buck naked, flinging his arms in joyous exaltation, galloping along the sand.
When I pause before it, I am a distant nephew honoring his uncle. I am a pilgrim, venerating an unexpected Saint.
Doug Wright
New York City
April 2009
THE NIGHT
OF THE
IGUANA
The play takes place in the summer of 1940 in a rather rustic and very Bohemian hotel, the Costa Verde, which, as its name implies, sits on a jungle-covered hilltop overlooking the “caleta,” or “morning beach” of Puerto Barrio in Mexico. But this is decidedly not the Puerto Barrio of today. At that time—twenty years ago—the west coast of Mexico had not yet become the Las Vegas and Miami Beach of Mexico. The villages were still predominantly primitive Indian villages, and the still-water morning beach of Puerto Barrio and the rain forests above it were among the world’s wildest and loveliest populated places.
The setting for the play is the wide verandah of the hotel. This roofed verandah, enclosed by a railing, runs around all four sides of the somewhat dilapidated, tropical-style frame structure, but on the stage we see only the front and one side. Below the verandah, which is slightly raised above the stage level, are shrubs with vivid trumpet-shaped flowers and a few cactus plants, while at the sides we see the foliage of the encroaching jungle. A tall coconut palm slants upward at one side, its trunk notched for a climber to chop down coconuts for rum-cocos. In the back wall of the verandah are the doors of a line of small cubicle bedrooms which are screened with mosquito-net curtains. For the night scenes they are lighted from within, so that each cubicle appears as a little interior stage, the curtains giving a misty effect to their dim inside lighting. A path which goes down through the rain forest to the highway and the beach, its opening masked by foliage, leads off from one side of the verandah. A canvas hammock is strung from posts on the verandah and there are a few old wicker rockers and rattan lounging chairs at one side.
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