Name: The Night of the Iguana
ISBN: 9780822208235

Tennessee Williams

Ex-minister Lawrence T. Shannon leads a bus tour of Baptist women on a trip to the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failures in his life.

The Night of the Iguana

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night. This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author’s original Foreword, the short story “The Night of the Iguana” which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch. “I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this…this…this angry, petulant old man.” —The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana

I wish I could understand the love that others seem to have for this play, but I thought the play had a few fantastic moments buried under bloat. I do want to see the movie though—there's so much detail in the stage direction that I want to see how it shows up off the page.