A yellow book cover with the title of the night of the iguana.

The Night of the Iguana, Tennessee Williams, 1961 

The last of Williams’ great plays takes place on the west coast of Mexico where Maxine Faulk, newly widowed, owns a seedy hotel with a verandah where the action takes place.  Reverend Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked Episcopalian priest, brings his Texas Bible College tour of women to the hotel after deflowering their youngest member.  They are joined by a family of Nazis and a Nantucket spinster and her 93 year old poet grandfather.  The priest has a nervous breakdown, the tour group leaves, the poet dies, Maxine gets her claws into Shannon, and Hannah Jelkes is the primary philosopher about life and making the best you can of a bad hand.  Very bleak, very hot and sweaty.  The eponymous iguana manages to escape and may be the luckiest in the cast.  Heading to see it in a few days at the ART with James Earl Jones as the poet.  (