The Night of the Iguana

Costume Design by Kelsey Hunt

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

“When I write I don’t mean to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do. But I don’t think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly.” –Tennessee Williams

“En Avant!” was the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s favorite way of signing off in his personal journals and letters. It means “onward and forward”, which not only was Williams’ motto in life, but also applies thematically to The Night of the Iguana.

Tennessee Williams (University of Texas at Austin)

In the summer of 1940, Williams fled to Mexico to try to forget about a recently ended love affair and find inspiration for his writing. During his travels he visits almost all the cities and locales mentioned in this play. In addition to the date in the play being identical, there are many other autobiographical nuances Williams writes into his play. He, too, showed up with hardly any money at a hotel called the Costa Verde outside of Acapulco that had Germans swarming around, which he came to loathe. He, too, composed a poem while there which appears in the play, only slightly altered. Also while there he, too, was haunted by “blue devils”—a manifestation of Williams’ insecurities and fears about his love life and his career which continued to haunt him the rest of his life. Undoubtedly, he, too, enjoyed a rum coco.

The ingredients of that vacation would take almost twenty years to coalesce into what is roundly thought of as his last great play. The play went through different incarnations as a short story, a one-act play for the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds, and an original title of Two Acts of Grace. On December 28, 1961, The Night of the Iguana opened in New York. The play seared its reputation into the American cultural canon by winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and by Time magazine placing Williams on its March 9, 1962 cover, proclaiming him “America’s greatest living playwright.” Perhaps more than anything that has sustained this play is the idea Williams himself revealed by saying the play is about “how to live beyond despair and still live.”

“Your tour includes...Paradise Regained”

• The play’s setting is a hotel perched between the rain forest and the Pacific Ocean, located outside of Acapulco, a 20th century hot spot for tourists of all kinds.
• In 2007, $14.78 had the same purchasing power as $1 in the year 1940. (www.measuringworth.com)
• Also in 1940, five pesos roughly equaled $1. (www.measuringworth.com)
• Though many productions choose to omit the German tourists from the play, they epitomize the cruelty of the time as the Farenkopfs cheer the Battle of Britain and mock the weak and afflicted.
• The German Armed Forces Intelligence Service was commonly referred to as the Abwehr. It is now known that the Abwehr had established Nazi espionage networks in Mexico that were linked to other Nazi networks in New York. (www.history.navy.mil)