Time, Fantasy, and Reality in Night of the Iguana

TIME, FANTASY, AND REALITY IN NIGHT OF THE IGUANA TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TELLS US HE CALLED The Glass Menagerie, his first major success, a "memory play" because it derived from memories of his youth in St. Louis. In The Night of the Iguana, his latest memory play, the source of recollection belongs to his characters. Time metes out to each a portion of pain: a vivid sense of the fantastic and a unique vision of reality. The play opened at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961. Several weeks later, Williams won his third New York Critics Circle Award. Iguana's plot is one of the flimsiest in the Williams canon. T. Lawrence Shannon, recently defrocked minister, now tourist guide, arrives at a rustic hotel in Mexico with a busload of women. His old friend Maxine Faulk takes him in. He befriends Hannah Jelkes, an itinerant quick-sketch artist, and her dying grandfather-poet, Nonno. Threatened with dismissal from Cook's Tours for improper behavior with an infatuated teenager, Shannon uses his twenty-four hours at the Cosa Verde to straighten out his life. After Nonno's death, Hannah prepares to leave while Shannon and Maxine prepare to begin a life together, he as stud for Maxine and she as proprietress of the hotel. Williams' dialogue dates the characters' psychological history, footnotes the setting, and collates the conflicts: real, fantastic, potential. Such a device has a dramatic basis and validity for Williams: by putting potentially volatile people in a remote setting, giving them a "portion of pain" from their past, Williams makes their indulgence in time-allusive dialogue quite natural and plausible, and to his own dramatic purpose, creates a "timeless world of a play" with the aid of events. For Williams, timelessness is constructed by fantastic moods, somewhat androgynous creatures, a transcendental theme, and an impression of "continual flow," which recalling the events evokes. Even down to the smallest detail he pursues his purpose: as throughout Williams' work, habit becomes a way to keep time at arm's length-with Maxine and Shannon, it is the rum-coco, which helps them get through the hot hours; with Hannah, it is sketching, a more functional art enabling her to use the passing time well. Whether feeding habit or stimulating recall (which is a habit with them), these breathing, walking chronom87 88 MODERN DRAMA May eters are time-bound. And whether dealing with the speech of his characters or his stage directions, Williams joins all to his aim: creating a "timeless world." Shannon, Maxine and Hannah are quite willing to lay bare their pasts and others'. They are careful to construct a pertinent chronology through dialogue, to mention generally dates which have become meaningful events in their lives and a record of their "psychological history." In a characteristically rhythmical prose, they speak in numbers, and the numbers come. Nonno was born on October 5, 1842.1 His first volume of poetry was published on March 4, 1869.2 It took him a few years before the First World War to become an established poet, but around 1914 and immediately beyond, he was a respected "minor-league poet."3 In 1915, he and Hannah, still an adolescent, began traveling together and continued to do so for twenty-five years.4 Fifteen years later, in 1930, Shannon begins his touring,5 and in 1935 he starts conducting round-the-world tours for Cook's.6 1936 finds him committed to an asylum.7 In 1938, he is importing a cook for Maxine's Cosa Verde,s and that very year Nonno and Hannah are "operating at the RafHes Hotel in Singapore."9 Shannon cracks up again in March, 1939, as he does "every eighteen months."lO A year later, in March, 1940, Maxine hires her diving boys.11 In August of that year Shannon has a bad tourist party and is put on probation,12 during whose first weeks Fred, Maxine's husband and senior by ten years, dies.13 In the play's 1" (Nonno) is ninety-seven years young and will be ninety-eight years young the fifth of next month, October." (Hannah, Act I) 2 "The day that...