Jay's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA Post - Tennessee Williams - Despair on the Beach

  Earlier this month I read a memoir about alcoholism that included the life and struggles of legendary playwright Tennessee Williams. The book, called “The Trip to Echo Spring,”  written by Olivia Lange, shed light on hardcore drunk writers that despite their addictions were somehow able to produce some of the most brilliant literature we know.  Maybe someone reading this will have read Tennessee’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or seen the movie version featuring the great Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor.  The former protrayed a bitter alcoholic/anti-social character named Brick who felt the need to distance himself from the people closest to him.  His family.  Each time he would run off, they asked him where  was he going?   He said, “Echo Spring.”  That’s the name of his favorite bourbon.  Apparently, he was always on the verge of losing his “shit.”

From what I’ve read of Tennessee, much of his writing is based on his own personal traumas.   Just like Brick in his play,  Tennessee didn’t go by his birth name.  His parents named him Tom.  Apparently, this name didn’t suit his nature.  Neither did his family.   He left home at an early age to follow his poetic heart.  He dreamed of becoming a writer.  Along the way he grew anxious, depressed, and suicidal in his attempts to publish his work.  He turned to alcohol and seconal to calm himself down.  Drink became his method to hold everything together.   And it did for a while.  Maybe for a 10-15 year stretch where  at a certain point, literary critics began to include him in a the pantheon of greatest American authors.

By February, 1983, however, he had lost his touch. He was still writing plays, but not on the level he once did. Maybe, like twenty years before, after he wrote Night of the Iguana. In 1983, He was found dead in his New York City hotel room on East 54^th Street.  His friends would describe him as haggard and miserable.  He would be the first to admit it.  On numerous occasions, he has explained the relentless tension and depression that comes with his job.   He looked to drugs and alcohol to steady his nerves. According to the coroner’s report, he choked on a bottlecap for the eyedrops he needed to clear his vision.  He would hold the cap on his tongue or underneath it while applying the drops  to his eyes. Later, the chief medical officer changed the report from asphixia to possible suicide. His autopsy showed a high degree of seconal in his stomach.  Many people in the know believe that story of asphixia was created to protect his legend.

Why am I concentrated on SUICIDE today?  It’s because after I read Echo Spring, I immediately sought out one of Tennessee’s more famous plays.  I found one.  The Night of the Iguana.  It may be one of his last successful works. For the next twenty years he began his steady decline.  I’m glad I read Echo Spring first.  I see a lot of Tennessee’s most tragic qualities in his protagonist, the defrocked Reverend Shannon.  The play begins with Shannon climbing the steps of a rustic, seaside Mexican hotel.  This takes place in the early 1940s.  Here, Shannon doesn’t look like a priest;  rather he looks like a drunk.  His eyes are bulging and he is sweating right though his clothes.  Shannon claims he is ‘feverish.”  Soon thereafter, he admits he might be having a mental breakdown.

  In the playnotes included in my copy of Iguana, Tennesse was a frequent guest of these types of seaside resorts in Mexico.  Far off the beaten path.  When he wrote this particular play, he was unraveling himself.  His love relationship with his traveling partner was gradually disintegrating.   This was in the 1940s, and Williams was gay. Quite possibly, he may have felt the world closing in on him.  He had nowhere to turn. In this day and age, he risked prestige and success of his profession if he were to reveal his sexuality.  The “Iguana” in the title of his play, is a lizard hotel staff kept tied with a rope to a post underneath the hotel until it was big and fat enough to eat.   The symbol of the “Iguana” just may have captured Tennessee’s feelings of clausrophobia and paranoia. He, too, must have felt trapped.  If he couldn’t change his life soon, he may have been headed to the same fate. The clock was ticking. 

I chose to read Tennessee’s Iguana: One, for my interest in it’s Mexican setting off the coast of Puerto Vallarta; and Two, for the appearance of Richard Burton in the 1962  film version of the play. I’m not to sure that Tennesse had any influence in the selection of Burton for his play, but if he was looking for a out-of-control drinker, he could find no better. Before ever beginning his film career, Burton was already known to drain three bottles of vodka per day.  When he starred in Camelot with Julie Andrews, he boasted he could drink a bottle of vodka through the matinee performance of the play, and then consume a bottle of brandy during the evening performance.  Quite possibly, many of th scenes shot on location captured Burton in the midst of a full blown binge.  According to legend, Burton started his drinking on the set at 7:00 a.m with beer.  By the time his scenes were completed, he could polish off a case. Tennessee knew all of this.  He was on call near the film locations should there be need for re-writes.  Tennessee wrote the Shannon/Burton character with his own self in mind.  The torture of his characters was based on his own mental state. From the beginning of the story, Shannon/Burton becomes increasingly hysterical.

My favortie scene in the play comes in Act Three.   Shannon is clearly in the stages of a mental breakdown.  He is now a defrocked priest and an accused rapist. ( He appears to have a nasty obsession with teenage girls - For both a priest and a tour guide, this can become a career ender.)   He realizes the jig is up.  Soon he will have no job and nowhere to go.    He threatens to dive in the ocean and “swim” all the way to China.  The owner of the hotel – and his only friend it seems – recgonizes this behavior.  She has seen it before.  He Is not joking about a swim; he is contemplating suicide.  In the play, she calls for her staff to tie him up with rope  in his hammock.  In the movie, however, they add a scene where Burton escapes from his hammock, and sprints down a jungle trail to a cliff overlooking the ocean.  The man was determined to die.  You could see it in his eyes. The scene ends with Burton diving headfirst off the cliff towards the Eastern sun, the younger staff members in hot pursuit.

I’m not writing a book report here, but I’m glad to integreate serious drama into my reading. In a few of my English classes, I assign theater pieces instead of novels.  My students appear to enjoy William Inge’s Bus Stop.  I share film clips of the Marilyn Monroe version in class.  I say this because at the time of the film’s release, Marilyn apparently was suffering from the same scrutiny and pressures Tennessee experienced.  Sadly, they shared a similar fate.   When we read passages of Bus Stop  out loud in class, I believe my students experience a connection with the Marilyn character they are reading.  When I share the stories of Marilyn’s real-life battles with mental health issues and drug addiction, they delve deeper into the story.

At the end of The Night of the Iguana,  the defrocked priest and compulsive rapist, Shannon, descends into the darkness of the hotel to seek out the fat lizard.  For Shannon’s  entire stay at this hotel, the iguana has been kept tied up under the hotel’s veranda at the end of a rope. The metaphor may never had been clearly illuminated in the first 130 pages of my copy, but at the end of the play Shannon feels a spiratual bond with this reptile.  He says to Hanna, another desperate traveler at the hotel: “The iguana? At the end of its rope? Trying to go on past the end of its goddam rope? Like you Like me!”   The play ends with Shannon cutting the rope and setting the iguana free. We imagine the iguana scurrying back to the cover and safety of the jungle.   I’m led to believe that Shannon has somehow learned the importance of taking control of his own life.

Both Tennessee and Marilyn died with high concentrations of seconal in their bloodstreams. In the fifites, these pills they became addicted to were called “blue devils.” Of course they made things worse by mixing their consumption with alcohol. Tennesseee and Marilyn lived lives of high-anxiety and ever-increasing drug abuse.   This is why I enjoy seeing  their work on the stage and screen.  Their real-life struggles shine through in their characters.  When we discuss these types of dramas in our classroom workshops, we go well beyond a "retell" of the stories.   My students seem to perk up and identify complex elements of the characters they are asked to analyze.

I tell them, to read these works, it’s like watching a car accident.  You just can’t look away.