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STRATFORD, Ont. -- It says something
about Tennessee
Williams' remarkable gifts as a dramatist that one of the most
moving passages he ever wrote concerns an encounter between a
sexually unfulfilled spinster and a lonely fetishist.
On the surface, it might seem merely
sordid, but as related on the
darkened, candle-lit stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre by actress
Seana McKenna, her memory of the experience achieves a rare beauty
and poignancy.
It happens during the final act of
the Stratford Festival's
absorbing new production of The Night of the Iguana -- the 1961
play
that marked Williams' last true hurrah before the flame of his
genius sputtered and began to die.
In this sequence, Hannah Jelkes is
recalling one of the two times
in her life when she actually aroused passion in another human
being. Her cynical listener is the boozy Rev. Shannon, a disgraced
Episcopal priest whose life is in shambles because of ``fornication
and heresy.'' He is portrayed with a merciless lack of
sentimentality by Geordie Johnson -- and this works in the scene's
favour by highlighting the inherent emotional power of the writing
itself.
As McKenna's remarkably resilient Hannah
tells her story, she is
also gently reaffirming the virtues of compassion, charity,
fortitude and simple human goodness.
Yet, like Shannon, she is a person
at the end of her tether and in
the most desperate of straits. She has arrived at this forsaken
Mexican hotel in the summer of 1940 with her 97-year-old
grandfather, Nonno (William Needles), dependent on the kindness
of
strangers. He, she proudly proclaims, is ``the oldest living
and
practising poet on earth'' and is struggling to complete his
first
new poem in 20 years. They have no home: they travel from country
to
country, from seedy hotel to seedy hotel, surviving on sales
from
her watercolours. Now the money has run out and they are destitute.
Shannon ekes out a living as a tour
guide, but his weakness for
booze and young girls is about to lose him that job as well.
There
is more than a hint that he is also about to lose his soul.
Tennessee Williams' views concerning
salvation and the processes of
redemption were scarcely conventional -- how could they be, in
view
of the personal demons that ultimately consumed him? But The
Night
of the Iguana, for all its sordidness of situation and tragic
implications, is an unusually humane work, with a genuine spiritual
dimension. ``Accept whatever it is you cannot improve,'' Hannah
says
at one point; it could be the playwright himself speaking.
The production, which opened Tuesday
at Stratford, has been
directed with great sensitivity by Antoni Cimolini. He and his
key
colleagues -- costume and set designer Guido Tondino, lighting
designer Steven Hawkins and composer Roger Perkins -- are largely
successful in evoking a sense of time and place, of a community
--
and by implication a world -- trembling on the edge of an abyss.
Where the production falters is where
the script falters: with the
characters on the periphery. Particularly glaring is the depiction
of the family of Nazi tourists revelling in the plight of Britain
during the Blitz: they are so superficially drawn that they never
emerge as more than grotesque caricatures. The one cameo that
works
comes from the ever dependable Bernard Hopkins who is the epitome
of
strutting, oily opportunism as the tour leader sent in to replace
Shannon.
Where the play and production show
their true power is in the
quartet of main characters who are all in some way or another
at a
crossroads.
There is Lally Cadeau swivelling her
way through her performance as
Maxine, the recently widowed proprietress of the hotel and a
woman
who sees the decrepit Shannon as the fulfillment of her emotional
and sexual needs. It's a formidable, take-no-prisoners
characterization by an actress capable of making earthiness seep
from her very pores. Yet beneath the brazen and profane exterior,
you sense vulnerability.
There is William Needles, whose Stratford
record now encompasses a
remarkable 39 seasons, delivering a deeply affecting portrayal
of
the aged Nonno. It's a truthfully observed characterization full
of
simple dignity and devoid of condescension.
There's Geordie Johnson's Shannon --
a dangerous acting assignment
because it can tempt a player into excess. Here, Johnson strikes
the
right balance, creating a temperament as worn and wrung-out as
his
rag of a suit. What Johnson conveys so admirably here is a character
in real religious conflict: when he rails against those theologians
who persist in perceiving God as some kind of ``cruel, senile
delinquent,'' he's really giving utterance to his own spiritual
anguish. But pride and dignity are still present in this, even
though they have frayed away to one final ghostly thread.
Finally, there's McKenna's serene but
heart-wrenching Hannah.
Williams once said that The Night of the Iguana is a play about
``how to live beyond despair and still live.'' Seana McKenna
shows
-- memorably -- what he meant.
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