Joan Marcus
The Night of the Iguana is a Tennessee Williams play of disparate parts—long, baggy of speech, and only for the dedicated and patient. Brave is the director and cast approaching it, because the play is unfocused and woolly in construction; the battle for the actors (particularly those playing leads Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon and Hannah Jelkes) is to navigate a comprehensible way through its hard yards of text.
Only occasionally does a new production of the play at Signature (through Feb. 25, 2024) locate spark and focus, such as in the pointed confrontations between hotel owner Maxine Faulk (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Hannah (Jean Lichty). One fashion-based mystery is why Maxine seems to be dressed in relatively modern dress, while the others look to be in the garb of the era the play is set—a beach-adjacent hotel in 1940’s Mexico.
The recently widowed Maxine is the confrontational, sexually assertive owner of a ramshackle hotel, who has an unquenchable crush on Shannon (Tim Daly). Shannon knows this, and uses it as a lever of control; his interest lies with the hippyish-seeming Hannah, a painter who, despite her arty wispiness, is actually on the make herself—as Maxine tells her, she needs to be as she has a hotel bill for herself and her grandfather, Nonno (Austin Pendleton), to pay. Nonno is trying to compose his final poem.