‘The Night of the Iguana’
The prospect of a revival of “The Night of the Iguana,” a Tennessee Williams play rarely revived anymore, seemed like a luxury I wasn’t sure I could afford in the ongoing political emergency.
But as the fine Boston Court Pasadena production, incisively directed by Jessica Kubzansky, bears out, Williams is the humane, humorously defiant playwright we need when authoritarianism is on the march.
“The Night of the Iguana” takes place in a sleepy, seaside Mexican village in 1940, just as Hitler’s Germany was advancing on Europe and Japan was plotting similar jingoistic pursuits on its own front. Britain was already in flames, a fact celebrated by a vacationing Nazi family at the Costa Verde Hotel, the rundown bohemian guest house sitting on a wild hilltop overlooking the beach that provides the play’s setting.
It’s off-season, and Maxine (Julanne Chidi Hill), the lusty widow proprietor, is frolicking flirtatiously on her veranda with the hotel staff just as a troubled old friend, Lawrence Shannon (Riley Shanahan), turns up in a tumult of noise. A mentally unbalanced reverend who was locked out of his church for committing the sins of fornication and heresy, he’s been leading a bus tour of teachers from a Baptist female college through Mexico, and these uptight women are refusing to get off the bus.
One particularly indignant passenger, Judith Fellowes (Ann Noble), has accused Shannon of statutory rape. Charlotte Goodall (Isabella Feliciana), an underage girl under Miss Fellowes’ watch, has fallen madly in love with Shannon and insists that he marry her after what happened between them in Mexico City.
Maxine can tell at a glance that Shannon is on the verge of another crackup. He’s trying to lay off both the booze and the teenage girls, but his feverish condition spells trouble ahead.
In the midst of this storm, two other guests show up looking for rooms on credit. Hannah (Jully Lee), a painter who does quick sketches for money, and her grandfather Nonno (Dennis Dun), a 97-year-old poet who is trying to finish his final poem before he dies, have been traveling the world together like birds, never knowing where they’ll rest or eat next.
Shannon and Hannah, as different as two people could be, form a connection that can’t help but antagonize jealous Maxine, whom Shannon cheekily calls the “insatiable widow.” Shannon, in extremis, suffers for sins he would rather not be accountable for. Hannah knows little of human corruption, but her knowledge of life — her spiritual knowledge — far exceeds that of his own.
Hannah has earned her wisdom the hard way — by accepting her itinerant fate. Shannon, by contrast, is deeply disillusioned. He sought refuge in the church to escape his own carnal longings and found condemnation everywhere, including in the mirror.
Sexually uninhibited Maxine (originally played on Broadway by Bette Davis) sees the body not as a source of potential evil but as a pleasurable defense against the onslaught of a merciless world. Her philosophy, while shocking to a busload of Baptist female college teachers, is one Williams himself might have espoused after a couple of Negronis.
Williams reminds us that even in our darkest political times, our inner lives continue along the same rocky spiritual paths. The playwright knows only too well that society’s most vulnerable — creative souls, outcasts, degenerates (labeled as such for refusing to play by the rules) — are the first targets of those whose end is power rather than freedom. The Nazi family making fleeting appearances in the play underscores the brutal conformity demanded by fascism.
The production, unfolding in the louche, tropical ambiance of the Costa Verde hotel (recreated with simple wooden panache by set designer Tesshi Nakagawa), impressively contains the dramatic sprawl. The actors are a touch overemphatic in the early going, but once the revival settles down, the core of Williams’ drama is movingly revealed
Hill’s Maxine, Shanahan’s Shannon and Lee’s Hannah sharply define the struggles of their characters, the desperate pressures they’re under, the various demons they’re battling. Lee, sublimely good, is particularly piercing in her portrayal of Hannah’s hard-won grace.
Shannon is baffled by her self-denial, but Hannah has attained an understanding of home not as a physical place but as a spiritual bulwark, born out of love and patient respect. It’s a lesson, this richly satisfying production suggests, that no earthly power can destroy except death — and possibly not even that.
‘Fly Me to the Sun’
The West Coast premiere of “Fly Me To the Sun” at the Fountain Theatre marks Raymond O. Caldwell’s directorial debut as the venue’s artistic director.
Brian Quijada’s play — an intergenerational immigrant tale performed as a meta-theatrical romp, complete with puppets, media projections and live and recorded music — tells us something about Caldwell’s artistic priorities. The Fountain’s tradition of extending a wide communal embrace, welcoming underrepresented voices and addressing urgent social concerns, is clearly going to be a mainspring of Caldwell’s leadership.
Last year, Caldwell directed the work’s premiere of “Fly Me to the Sun” at the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage in Tysons, Va. That production was performed by the playwright.
At the Fountain, Gerardo Navarro stars as BQ, the storyteller, and Noé Cervantes assists as DJ, who in addition to playing tracks, serves as BQ’s wingman brother.
“Fly Me to the Sun” tells the story of BQ’s grandmother, Abuela Julia, who after the tragic death of her son in her home country of El Salvador, agrees to live with her daughter and grandsons in America. Grieving Julia needs family support, but she agrees to an extended American visit only to help with the childcare. Being a burden on her loved ones is the last thing she wants.
BQ hosts a wild and whirling streaming late-night talk show, full of corny jokes and clumsy rap, and he uses this anything-goes forum to tell us all about Julia. He relives the period of his boyhood when his abuela was there to greet him after school and impart to him the cultural heritage he was living apart from.
Abuela Julia is played by a puppet that BQ spiritedly brings to life. Through the somber perspective of time, he’s better able to appreciate those eccentric customs of his grandmother that he found weird when he was a first-generation American kid just trying to fit in.
Julia wants him to know where his people came from. She cooks strange things for him — a school bake sale becomes a source of humiliation for him. She also questions the values he is absorbing in an America that turns everything into a survival-of-the-fittest contest. It’s a testament to the production that she’s not only the most vivid character on stage but also the most noble.
“Fly Me to the Sun” is sweet and unabashedly sentimental. Performed with frenetic theatrical energy by Navarro and Cervantes, the show is perhaps at its most affecting as an act of witnessing. An increasingly vulnerable group in today’s America is brought into poignant emotional focus through the story of a boy and his loving grandmother.
Artistically, “Fly Me to the Sun” is overstretched. The cutesy performance shtick around a shoestring variety show — imagine Pee-wee’s Playhouse without the bewitching oddity — grows wearying.
The Fountain has a rich history of producing plays that are distinguished as much for their poetic as their political daring. Athol Fugard, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins are among the dramatists who put their unmistakable imprints on the Fountain.
“Fly Me to the Sun” falls short of this standard. The piece takes risks, but lacks control. The puppet scenes, bestowing a belated yet supremely deserved spotlight on Abuela Julia, are the most original and haunting aspect of a production that too often flails for effects.
‘Adolescent Salvation’
Rogue Machine Theatre’s world premiere production of “Adolescent Salvation” takes place in the bedroom of a withdrawn high school girl harboring a dangerous secret.
The Henry Murray Stage upstairs at the Matrix Theatre has been transformed into an adolescent hideaway, where music and literature are the only salves for alienated brooding. Set and lighting designer Joel Daavid has created not so much a room as a mood, materializing the inner weather of a teen in trouble.
A famous photo of Patti Smith hangs on the wall, reflecting a vinyl-loving youngster’s maverick taste. Yes, there’s a turntable, along with an iPhone and posters of other countercultural figures from earlier generations.
Natasha (Carolina Rodriguez) is so far removed from her peer group that she doesn’t even know one of Taylor Swift’s biggest hits. Two visitors her age, both named Taylor, can’t wrap their minds around this astounding ignorance.
The more aggressive Taylor (Alexandra Lee), the daughter of a friend of Natasha’s mother, was invited to spend the night while their moms tie one on at the local franchise hangout. She’s brought along the other Taylor (Michael Guarasci), whom she calls her “gay emotional support animal.”
Natasha resents the intrusion. She’d rather be alone, but her mother is worried that she’s so isolated. Taylor’s mom just doesn’t trust leaving her daughter, a psychological arsonist, home alone.
Naturally, the untrustworthy Taylor is the play’s catalyst. But one of the refreshing features of Tim Venable’s play is that no character behaves strictly according to type. The web of their lives “is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” to filch from Shakespeare, and Venable combines virtues and vices in unexpected patterns.
The volatility of the youthful trio of “Adolescent Salvation” seems to have no limits. In other words, these are normal high school kids, living on the existential edge.
Something particularly disturbing, however, is going on in Natasha’s life. Taylor ferrets out the secret with her bloodthirsty relentlessness and immediately raises pandemonium. Her gay bestie is also alarmed, but this Taylor is a more sensitive soul. The more he bonds with Natasha, the more determined Taylor is to do something with the information she’s unearthed.
Venable doesn’t treat the adults in the story any different than he treats the youth. It would spoil the plot to list everyone who appears in the play. Even the program handed out to theatergoers keeps one character’s identity under wraps.
Suffice it to say that the grown-ups are also a mixed bag, as sad and selfish as they are concerned and capable of surprising empathy. Venable treats even his most culpable characters as human beings — perhaps the play’s boldest move in an age of moral absolutes.
The setup, unfortunately, is more convincing than the plot’s execution. Venable distills his situation into a scene, which he then overtaxes into a full-scale play.
Director Guillermo Cienfuegos allows verisimilitude to get the better of pacing. The actors wallow in the interstices of the dialogue. The intimate space might seem perfect for a full immersion in screen-acting realism, but film and TV permit the director to shape the final cut in the editing room. Pauses must be earned on stage.
“Adolescent Salvation” impresses with its behavioral accuracy in the small moments. But the bigger moments are where this psychologically and morally fascinating play goes off the rails.
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