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Theatre Guild does Tennessee Williams classic "The Night of the Iguana"
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The Night of the Iguana at the Ancon Theater

a review by Eric Jackson

The Night of the Iguana

by Tennessee Williams

directed by Pat Quinn

produced by the Theatre Guild of Ancona and Ron Leggiere

with Varoon Anand, Theresa M. Apple, Betsy Ward, Edmundo Ward, Ximena Cambefort, Charlotte Arnoux, David Savastuk, Maro Guevara and Ron Leggiere

stage manager Jeanne Marie Leggiere

backstage and props, Brenda Scott and Jeanne Marie Leggiere

set design Ron Leggiere and Pedro Caicedo

set construction Ron Leggiere adn Rogelio Sánchez

set creative decoration Gale Cellucci, Ron Leggiere and Brenda Scott

Lighting design Pedro Caicedo

Lighting technician Bolivar Arauz

Sound Michael Henríquez

Is The Night of the Iguana part of the American theatrical canon? Well informed people can argue.

There is no question that its author, Tennessee Williams, was one of the giants of American theatrical history. There is no question that this is one of the plays that actors being taught the Stanislavsky Method, wherein people try to summon up emotions from their experiences and the depths of their souls to "become" the characters whom they portray, very often perform.

The best argument against the play's inclusion in the "must know" category for anyone conversant in American drama is that, even though this work won Williams the New York Drama Critics Circle award in 1961 --- 20 years after it was written --- two of Williams's other plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, won Pulitzer Prizes. Add another New York Drama Critics Circle award for The Glass Menagerie and a Tony for The Rose Tattoo and a bunch of other fine works that didn't win major awards and the question of what's so great in Tennessee Williams's body of work that every educated theater person should know it will be one of those matters that can never really be resolved. There are also those who for religious or cultural reasons reject Tennessee Williams and his work because he was gay, or because most of his plays deal with complicated sexual or moral situations, or because his characters are too contradictory for the demands of simplistic minds, neither perfect heroes or uniformly horrible villains.

Now comes Pat Quinn, a method actress, drama educator and director who got her start at the Ancon Theater in the Guild's early days a half-century ago and along the way was on Broadway, off Broadway, in Hollywood and led astray from a troubled marriage with the assistance of an air compressor as Alice in the Alice's Restaurant movie.

Quinn has come back to Panama to live and write and  work, and this production of The Night of the Iguana was one of those plays in which the Theatre Guild people --- mostly young amateurs doing community theater --- hone their skills.

That they did. This was a solid production, with excellent performances in the leading roles by Varoon Anand, who played an outcast former preacher with a history of sexual misadventures and bouts of insanity, and Theresa M. Apple, a US Embassy person by day who portrayed a hustling spinster artist on the road with her dying father (Edmundo Ward).

Educator, real estate lady and mother of four Betsy Ward plays the recently widowed owner of a Mexican seaside resort with some very adult intentions and a two-year-old's instincts ('mine!!!') that lead her into conflict with Betsy Ward's character. High school student Charlotte Arnoux, a notable young talent in Panama's English-language theater scene, is the jailbait over whom Anand's character is in trouble and losing his mind, while Ximena Cambefort, depending on one's point of view, plays this insufferable butch tyrant or this zealous defender against a scandal-tainted wannabe reverend's sexual predations.

I have attended a couple of other stage productions of The Night of the Iguana --- both by university students --- and I saw the early 60s movie, which of course was a different art form. Some changes in plot and music were made to put this production in a different time than the original eve of US entry into World War II. Quinn dispensed with the original play's fascistic Germans and decided not to substitute another enemy from another time.

Attendance was low on the night I caught the play, but I am told substantially higher for the American Society benefit performance. Theatre Guild productions this time of the year always have attendance problems, because so much of the American community is traveling.

No matter, really, even though theater people would always prefer a full house. Pat Quinn's version of The Night of the Iguana advanced the development of Panama's English-language theater scene and left an aftertaste that demands more of what she has to contribute. It was also a fun way for this reviewer to spend a Friday night in mid-July.

Theatre Guild does Tennessee Williams classic "The Night of the Iguana"
Cool Internet Sites