THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

“Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.” – Tennessee Williams

Like Gwendolyn Brooks’ Negro Hero, Tennessee Williams' characters must define their own morality. Living in existential loneliness, each of Williams’ characters craves the temporary connections which life sometimes gives. Tom in Menagerie and Blanche in Streetcar never manage to make meaningful connects. Brick and Big Daddy and then Maggie seem to manage such moments in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but it is Hannah from The Night of the Iguana who perhaps defines the moment best:

HANNAH: No, I’m not hopeless…. In fact, I’ve discovered something to believe in.

SHANNON: Something like… God?

HANNAH: No.

SHANNON: What?

HANNAH: Broken gates between people so they can reach each other, even if it’s just for one night only…. One night… communication between them on a verandah outside their… separate cubicles…. A little understanding exchanged between them, a wanting to help each other through nights like this.

In a play with perhaps less meat to it than the other three Williams’ plays I discuss, he here gives us a character quite as broken as any other, but a character who knows something about the need for human connection. And when there is no longer a god for characters to believe in, what else is left but some human connection?

In Iguana, the viewer is presented with a broken man of faith surrounded by women – some of whom wish him well; some of whom wish him ill. Shannon’s faith has been tested and then lost – that is, his faith in humanity has been lost. However, he’s still trying hard to connect human to human: “I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!... and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!” However, Shannon’s impassioned statement is made to a woman without such a heart – a woman who seeks his ruin.

Williams does this – has his characters explain themselves to others who cannot understand – precisely because such moments touch the audience so deeply. We know what it means to not be understood. And Williams knows that we know. Introducing the penguin edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays (which contains Iguana), Williams quotes an earlier statement of his regarding the connection between the playwright and the audience: “We come to each other, gradually, but with love…. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.” Williams believes in an intimate relationship between himself and his audience: “Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to.” Clearly Williams sees his plays, his characters, as ways of crying out from his personal solitary cell to those other lonely prisoners in his audience trapped in their own cells for life.

With Shannon and Hannah and the rest of Iguana’s crowd, Williams gives his viewer several contradictory moral statements. And even a few amoral or perhaps nearly immoral ones. In the play there is no loving, caring god; there is no clear compass to salvation. Williams makes one moral path clear, however, and that is the statement of Hannah’s above: the only real thing to believe in is broken gates between people. The breaks are temporary – sometimes only for one night – but the connections are real. They are the modern substitution for a belief in some connection to a caring god in a world where such god is missing.

So, Menagerie and Streetcar present the loneliness of characters for whom the gates never seem to break – at least they don’t break for two characters at once like they do for Shannon and Hannah. Iguana gives a bit of hope for the love that can be found in such breaks, in the recognition of the humanity of another. But for me it is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that shows most powerfully how sublime is Williams personal lyricism as his characters cry out for honesty and love amidst a life of solitary confinement.