1955 March 24: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara and Burl Ives. Cat wins the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award.
The film version of The Rose Tattoo, for which Anna Magnani later wins an Academy Award, is released.
1956 The film Baby Doll, with a screenplay by Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, is released amid some controversy and is blacklisted by Catholic leader Cardinal Spellman.
June: In the Winter of Cities, Williams’s first book of poetry, is published.
1957 March 21: Orpheus Descending, a revised version of Battle of Angels, directed by Harold Clurman, opens on Broadway but closes after two months.
1958 February 7: Suddenly Last Summer and Something Unspoken open off-Broadway under the collective title Garden District.
The film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is released.
1959 March 10: Sweet Bird of Youth opens on Broadway and runs for three months.
The film version of Suddenly Last Summer, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, is released.
1960 November 10: The comedy Period of Adjustment opens on Broadway and runs for over four months.
The film version of Orpheus Descending is released under the title The Fugitive Kind.
1961 December 29: The Night of the Iguana opens on Broadway and runs for nearly ten months.
The film versions of Summer and Smoke and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone are released.
1962 The film versions of Sweet Bird of Youth and Period of Adjustment are released.
1963 January 15: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens on Broadway and closes immediately due to a blizzard and a newspaper strike. It is revived January 1, 1964, in a Broadway production starring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter and closes within a week.
September: Frank Merlo dies of lung cancer.
1964 The film version of Night of the Iguana is released.
1966 February 22: Slapstick Tragedy (The Mutilated and The Gnädiges Fräulein) runs on Broadway for less than a week.
December: A novella and stories are published under the title The Knightly Quest.
1968 March 27: Kingdom of Earth opens on Broadway under the title The Seven Descents of Myrtle.
The film version of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is released under the title Boom!
1969 May 11: In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel opens off-Broadway and runs for three weeks.
Committed by his brother Dakin for three months to the Renard Psychiatric Division of Barnes Hospital in St. Louis.
The film version of Kingdom of Earth is released under the title The Last of the Mobile Hot Shots.
Awarded Doctor of Humanities degree by the University of Missouri and a Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1970 February: A book of plays, Dragon Country, is published.
1971 Williams breaks with his agent Audrey Wood. Bill Barnes assumes his representation, and then later Mitch Douglas.
1972 April 2: Small Craft Warnings opens off-Broadway.
Williams is given a Doctor of Humanities degree by the University of Hartford.
1973 March 1: Out Cry, the revised version of The Two-Character Play, opens on Broadway.
1974 September: Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed, a book of short stories, is published.
Williams is presented with an Entertainment Hall of Fame Award and a Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club.
1975 The novel Moise and the World of Reason is published by Simon and Schuster and Williams’s Memoirs is published by Doubleday.
1976 January 20: This Is (An Entertainment) opens in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater.
June: The Red Devil Battery Sign closes during its out-of-town tryout in Boston.
November 23: Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a rewritten version of Summer and Smoke, opens in New York.
April: Williams’s second volume of poetry, Androgyne, Mon Amour, is published.
1977 May 11: Vieux Carré opens on Broadway and closes within two weeks.
1978 Tiger Tail premieres at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, and a revised version premieres the following year at the Hippodrome Theater in Gainsville, Florida.
1979 January 10: A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur opens off-Broadway.
Kirche, Küche, Kinder workshops off-Broadway at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater.
Williams is presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington by President Jimmy Carter.
1980 January 25: Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? premieres for a limited run at the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center in Key West, Florida.
March 26: Williams’s last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, opens and closes after 15 performances.
1981 August 24: Something Cloudy, Something Clear premieres off-Broadway at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater.
1982 May 8: The second of two versions of A House Not Meant to Stand opens for a limited run at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
1983 February 24: Williams is found dead in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York City. It is determined from an autopsy that the playwright died from asphyxiation, choking on a plastic medicine cap. Williams is later buried in St. Louis.
1984 July: Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays is published.
1985 November: Collected Stories, with an introduction by Gore Vidal, is published.
1995 The first half of Lyle Leverich’s important biography, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, is published by Crown Publishers.
1996 September 5: Rose Isabelle Williams dies in Tarrytown, New York.
September 5: The Notebook of Trigorin, in a version revised by Williams, opens at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
1998 March 5: Not About Nightingales premieres at the Royal National Theatre in London, directed by Trevor Nunn, later moves to Houston, Texas, and opens November 25, 1999, on Broadway.
1999 November: Spring Storm is published.
2000 May: Stairs to the Roof is published.
November: The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I is published.
2001 June: Fugitive Kind is published.
2002 April: Collected Poems is published.
2004 August: Candles to the Sun is published.
November: The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II is published.
2005 April: Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays is published.
2008 April: A House Not Meant to Stand and The Traveling Companion and Other Plays are published.
May 20: Walter Dakin Williams dies at the age of 89 in Belleville, Illinois.
Copyright © 1961 The University of the South, renewed 1987 by The University of the South
“A Summer of Discovery” © 1961 The University of the South
The short story “The Night of the Iguana” Copyright © 1948 The University of the South
Introduction, “Uncle Tennessee” © 2009 by Doug Wright
“Acts of Grace” © 2009 by Kenneth Holditch
Copyright © 2009 New Directions Publishing Corporation
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Night of the Iguana, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth including the Dominion of Canada, all countries of the Berne Convention, and of all other countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, video or
sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings, permission for which must be secured from the agent for The University of the South, Casarotto Ramsay & Associates Limited, National House, 60-66 Wardour St., London W1V 3ND, England. The Night of the Iguana is published by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
Inquiries concerning the amateur rights of The Night of the Iguana should be directed to The Dramatists Play Service, 440 Park Avenue South, New York 10016, without whose permission in writing no amateur performance may be given.
The epigraph by Emily Dickinson is from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, published by Little, Brown & Co. “My Shadow” paraphrased from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885.
Cover design by Ben Wiseman/Rodrigo Corral Design
First published clothbound by New Directions in 1961
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1156 in 2009
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Canada Books, Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.
The night of the iguana / by Tennessee Williams; introduction by Doug Wright.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8112-2078-1
I. Title.
PS3545.I5365N5 2009
812’.54—dc222009019755
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
PLAYS
Baby Doll & Tiger Tail
Camino Real (with Ten Blocks on the Camino Real)
Candles to the Sun
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
Fugitive Kind
A House Not Meant to Stand
The Glass Menagerie
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays:
These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch, Mister Paradise, The Palooka, Escape, Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily?, Summer At The Lake, The Big Game, The Pink Bedroom, The Fat Man’s Wife, Thank You Kind Spirit, The Municipal Abattoir, Adam and Eve on a Ferry, And Tell Sad Stories of The Deaths of Queens...
The Night of the Iguana
Not About Nightingales
The Notebook of Trigorin
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
Spring Storm
Stairs to the Roof
Stopped Rocking and Other Screen Plays:
All Gaul is Divided, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, One Arm, Stopped Rocking
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sweet Bird of Youth (with The Enemy: Time)
The Traveling Companion and Other Plays:
The Chalky White Substance, The Day on Which a Man Dies, A Cavalier for Milady, The Pronoun ‘I’, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, Kirche Küche Kinder, Green Eyes, The Parade, The One Exception, Sunburst, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, The Traveling Companion
27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays:
27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Purification, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, The Last of My Solid Gold Watches, Portrait of a Madonna, Auto-Da-Fé, Lord Byron’s Love Letter, The Strangest Kind of Romance, The Long Goodbye, Hello From Bertha, This Property is Condemned, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, Something Unspoken
The Two-Character Play
Vieux Carré
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume I:
Battle of Angels, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume II:
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume III:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume IV:
Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, The Night of the Iguana
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume V:
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle), Small Craft Warnings, The Two-Character Play
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume VI:
27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Short Plays
Includes all the plays from the individual volume of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays plus The Unsatisfactory Supper, Steps Must be Gentle, The Demolition Downtown
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume VII:
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and Other Plays
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, I Rise in Flames, Cried the Phoenix, The Mutilated, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, Confessional, The Frosted Glass Coffin, The Gnädiges Fräulein, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, Lifeboat Drill, Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws, This is the Peaceable Kingdom
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume VIII:
Vieux Carré, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, The Red Devil Battery Sign
POETRY
Collected Poems
In the Winter of Cities
PROSE
Collected Stories
Hard Candy and Other Stories
One Arm and Other Stories
Memoirs
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II
New Selected Essays: Where I Live
The Night of the Iguana Page 17
