Almost as upsetting as the fact that “The Night of the Iguana” is lesser Tennessee Williams is that director Janice Akers’ current production of it is lesser Theater Emory, too. Whether or not you always fully embrace the company’s academically oriented work, it’s usually interesting and rarely dull. At three hours, Williams’ play is heavy going to begin with; at Akers’ meandering pace, it’s slow moving on top of that.
“Iguana” unfolds at a modest Mexican beachfront hotel circa 1940. Robin Bloodworth portrays the down-and-out protagonist, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked clergyman who has been reduced to serving as a tour guide for a busload of women from a Texas bible college.
Laying it on rather thickly, Williams paints the character in the broadest possible brush strokes – a recovering alcoholic recently released from a sanitarium after suffering a nervous breakdown amid scandalous allegations of the statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl. Needless to say, Shannon’s at a pivotal crossroad in his life, and just in case you miss it early on that he’s at the end of his proverbial rope, Williams hammers home the point with references to a certain reptile that’s tied to a post beneath the hotel’s veranda.
Bloodworth is not an untalented actor, but he tends to make the least of the role, as if he were starring in some kind of outrageous comedy of errors instead of a hard-hitting, soul-searching drama. When Shannon’s inevitably tempted to take another drink or by his encounter with an underage vixen, any sense of danger and life-or-death consequences barely register. In his most overheated moments, Bloodworth rattles off a lot of his dialogue unintelligibly.
Splendid performances from two of the other professionals in the cast help compensate. In the smaller part of a dying old poet, Tim McDonough’s delivery of one last poem at the end of the play is a thing of beauty. And keep your eye on the radiant Agnes Lucinda Harty during another of his recitations about the “expression of despair.” As Maxine, the earthy widow who runs the hotel, Harty fairly easily walks away with the show.
In nine out of 10 Theater Emory productions, the casting of student actors in some of the roles is never a problem. In this instance, however, Akers puts to particularly poor use both Madeline Teissler and Emma Calabrese. You can’t really fault these twentysomething actresses for lacking the stage presence or experience of pros like Bloodworth, Harty and McDonough, but you can blame their director for expecting an audience to believe them as a couple of middle-aged spinsters.
Akers and lighting designer Robert J. Turner pull out all the stops in a vividly realized thunderstorm sequence (the rumble of marching troops in the air is an eerily effective touch by sound designers Mitchell Amstutz and Liz Waldman). But for all of its talk about forces of nature, this “Night of the Iguana” is mainly a lot of hot air.
THEATER REVIEW
“The Night of the Iguana”
Grade: C
Through April 15. 7 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. $16-$20. Mary Gray Munroe Theater (in the Dobbs University Center on the Emory campus), 605 Asbury Cir., Atlanta. 404-727-5050. theater.emory.edu.
Bottom line: A long day’s journey into night.
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