Regular student vices like excess caffeine and poor late night food are nothing compared to the depravity of the characters in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. Hart House Theatre’s latest production centres on a disgraced priest charged with statutory rape who is plagued with alcoholism and who is in the midst of a nervous break down. Taking a “sabbatical” from preaching, the Rev. Lawrence Shannon serves as a tour guide in 1940s Mexico for a group of young Texan women (one of whom, a minor, he sleeps with, much to the disapproval of her chaperone). His loss of faith and fragile mental state send him on a bender that would rival any pub crawl on Bloor Street.
This production of Night of the Iguana is a strong finish to the Hart House Theatre’s season. David Ferry provides an engaging performance as Rev. Larry Shannon, portraying him as a tormented but still relatable character. Like the spinster Hannah Jelkes and the widowed but fun-loving hotel manager Maxine Faulk, Shannon is “one of God’s creatures at the end of (his) rope.” As Jeremy Hutton, the Hart House Theatre Artistic Director, describes it, the play follows these three characters’ raw and ugly journey of spiritual healing.
From the hammock to the rum-cocos, the set convincingly appears as a Mexican hotel. At times, the cluttered layering of the dialogue and the low volume of the actors’ voices made their lines difficult to understand, especially when it came to the uptight tour chaperone, whose voice often verged on being shrill. Some of the characters could have been more developed (the character Hannah Jelkes, in particular) as, in some scenes, the acting emotionally flat-lined and the characters seemed one-dimensional. Over all the cast was able to connect with its audience and recreate the world of a wandering poet and a faithless priest, of difficult struggles treated with light quips, of loneliness and “the potential for human contact.”
