Written in 1961, Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (at the Pershing Square Signature Center through February 25) is essentially an Episcopalian Graham Greene story: we’re in sweaty, dissolute 1940 Mexico, where a defrocked minister alternates between torturing himself with alcohol and taking advantage of teenaged schoolgirls he subsequently enlists in his penitential prayers. I find Protestant guilt to be merely a decaf version of Catholic guilt, but perhaps that is just the bias of someone formed by the Church of Rome. Nevertheless, the play finds Williams at his best, with penetrating psychological insights but not much of the campy histrionics of A Streetcar Named Desire, although its climax does feature the unintentionally comic spectacle of its ranting protagonist being bound up in a hammock to prevent him from hurling himself suicidally into the ocean.
Since almost the entire play is an inquiry into the soiled soul of its lead character, the ex-minister T. Lawrence “Larry” Shannon, it stands or falls on the strength of its lead performance. Shannon must be both piteous and seductive, poisoned yet charismatic, a glorious shipwreck of a man. He could have been written specifically for Richard Burton, who in the 1964 film version set the standard to which all others will be compared. Unfortunately, the veteran stage director Emily Mann’s production is saddled with the guy from the long-running but quickly forgotten 1990s sitcom Wings. Tim Daly, who is no longer young but remains blandly handsome and as thin as a runway model, plays the blustery Shannon so diffidently I couldn’t decide whether, several evenings past opening night, he hadn’t quite committed his lines to memory or he had elected to play the part sputtering like an engine on a cold winter morning. Delivering those lines in a stop-and-go cadence, he dilutes the quality of the writing and makes his character seem small.
That’s a shame, because the production has much to recommend it. Beowulf Boritt’s single set superbly establishes the milieu, which is the veranda of a luxury-challenged hotel in Puerto Vallarta. The doors look as if they haven’t been painted since the nineteenth century. The owner-manager Maxine Faulk, played by a perfectly cast Daphne Rubin-Vega, has recently lost her fisherman husband after he got infected by a hook, but such is the spirit of careless decay that she doesn’t much miss him. People come and go. What does it matter in the end? Have another drink.
People come and go. What does it matter in the end? Have another drink.
Her husband’s friend Shannon, a downwardly mobile tour guide who has arrived at nearly the lowest rung of the ladder for a self-styled gentleman (the playwright’s grandfather was an Episcopalian rector with whom he traveled in Europe), is in the midst of one of his regular existential breakdowns when he makes an unscheduled stop at the hotel, about to desert a bus full of seething Baptist women’s-college students and their mannish matron (Lea DeLaria of Orange Is the New Black). On behalf of her charges, she demands he continue the tour and take them to a comfortable hotel in the city as arranged. Instead, Shannon pockets the key, wallows in his despair, and accepts some drinks from the nurturing Maxine. Honking noises can be heard in the distance, but Shannon isn’t budging. A storm is coming overnight, and he hopes to be stricken dead by the Lord’s wrath in retribution for his sins, which include the statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old girl on the tour.
Shannon’s original disgrace, it turns out, was triggered not only by a dalliance with another girl, but also by a charge that he gave one or two “atheistical sermons.” This he denies; when he referred to the Almighty as a “senile delinquent,” he says he was merely describing the false way world religion perceived Him. Knowing what he knew about man’s capacity to transgress, he chafed at the idea of God as
the sort of old man in a nursing home that’s putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can’t put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table. Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it—accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent.
The hotel’s status as a sort of roach motel for the woebegone is reaffirmed when a proud but penniless New England spinster approaching forty, Hannah Jelkes (Jean Lichty), arrives, wheeling her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Nonno (Austin Pendleton), up a hill and begging for a room on credit. Hannah, all Old Boston airs and graces, gradually reveals that despite her finishing-school manners she is a sidewalk sketch-artist who manages to stay afloat, barely, by selling portraits to tourists. Her nodding, semi-coherent aged relative, who at his absolute peak might generously have been described as a minor poet, is composing one last work, whose incongruously beautiful lines he occasionally yelps out. Hannah at first seems like a scheming counterpart to the louche Shannon, but in the second act, when she sadly reveals that she has never come close to having a sexual relationship, her dignified purity seems like a possible source of salvation to the ex-priest. After the unwashed, groaning Shannon has spent much of the play writhing in his hammock complaining of his torments, she astutely notes that he isn’t particularly gifted at this business of suffering:
There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock—no nails, no blood, no death. Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon?
If Shannon comes across as a shallower version of the Whisky Priest in Greene’s The Power and the Glory (which was published in 1940, the year of the action in the The Night of the Iguana), that could be by design. He’s such a failure that he isn’t even very good at scourging himself. Meanwhile, some of Maxine’s spirited young staffers have captured a large iguana and tied it up under the veranda, intending to eat it later. The offstage noises it makes in its angry thrashing are a suitable metaphor for Shannon’s trapped bitterness. Perhaps all he needs is the gentle guidance of a good woman such as Hannah?
A 1940s Hollywood solution would, however, be too sentimental for Williams, who manages to steer events to a dramatically acceptable conclusion aided by a sudden spurt of lucidity from the poet Nonno. Even more than the lizard scuttling under the veranda, his words capture what’s going on with Shannon:
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
Last year’s most adorable Broadway show, Kimberly Akimbo, which went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical, was a teen tale with a wrenching twist: one of its high schoolers suffered from a bizarre accelerated-aging disease that was guaranteed to kill her by age twenty or so. This year’s successor is How to Dance in Ohio (at the Belasco Theatre), another big-hearted charmer about young people, this time with the dark cloud being autism. The seven central characters, who are in their late teens or early twenties, have the condition, as do the performers playing them. The setup seems to demand a certain generosity of spirit on the part of the audience—as if we weren’t being generous enough already by paying Broadway ticket prices—but the cast is stellar. All of the principals are gifted singers and more than adequate actors. They’re playing people with autism, but if we hadn’t been told they had that trait in real life, we wouldn’t necessarily have guessed it.
Based on the 2015 documentary film of the same title, How to Dance in Ohio features a cute array of pop-rock songs (music by Jacob Yandura, book and lyrics by Rebekah Greer Melocik) that serve chiefly to define the characters of the seven young folks who come together for regular sessions with a family therapist, Dr. Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), whose non-autistic daughter Ashley (Cristina Sastre), a budding ballerina, has returned home to Columbus from Juilliard after suffering an injury and now assists him at his practice. The movie focused on three young women: Marideth (Madison Kopec), an introvert who says she loves facts and often communicates by sharing trivia she finds in her reading; Caroline (Amelia Fei), a college student who brags that she has a boyfriend (though we don’t meet him); and her best friend Jessica (Ashley Wool). The stage version has filled out the cast with four fictional characters: Mel (Imani Russell), who works in a pet shop; Remy (Desmond Luis Edwards), an aspiring costumer who hosts a dress-up show on an internet channel; Drew (Liam Pearce), who has been accepted to the University of Michigan but isn’t sure he wants to attend; and Tommy (Conor Tague), who is eagerly preparing to take his driver’s test and join the ranks of licensed motorists.
The show places a thick, glossy coat of sugar on autism.
The wisp of a plot concerns the kids’ hopes for a successful night out at a spring formal, an ersatz prom staged by Dr. Amigo solely for his therapy group. The idea is to give the youngsters, several of whom are being overly sheltered by their parents, a goal that prompts them to learn basic social skills associated with growing up—asking for dates, learning to dance, and picking out appropriate clothing for the occasion and wearing it without complaint. (One young lady has a problem with zippers.) The show places a thick, glossy coat of sugar on autism—all of these kids are relatively well-adjusted, none of them has a tantrum or otherwise causes much in the way of problems, and when Tommy crashes a car it’s played for a laugh, with no one getting hurt. But the overall effect, especially in the superb first act, is not to define what’s unusual about autistic people but instead to universalize their experience. If autism manifests as social awkwardness, who hasn’t felt that? Who, especially when young, has never felt left out of a joke, or thought the boss hadn’t given clear instructions about what was expected on the job? Above all: what could be more mortifying than being a lovestruck teen asking for a date? The show endearingly reminds us that every color is on the spectrum. Songs such as “Today Is,” about the kids’ morning routines, and “Under Control,” in which Drew tries to talk himself past his anxieties, pop with energy. “Building Momentum,” which seeks to recapture the spirited optimism of “Defying Gravity” in Wicked, is a plucky can-do anthem about overcoming adversity, broadly applicable and thoroughly appealing.
Unfortunately, after the first act races toward a climax—one day until the spring formal!—the second act drags, with several numbers stopping the plot dead. Mel, for instance, sings a pointlessly off-topic number about the afterlife, “Reincarnation.” The major development of the second half is a contrivance in which secondary and even tertiary figures threaten to derail the dance while the seven principals wait offstage for things to be sorted out. The device turns out to be a mere detour whose only effect is to delay the dance by a single day. Most of the second act seems added merely to pad the running time so that the show is long enough to include an intermission at which drinks and merchandise can be sold. At a brisk ninety minutes or so, in a single act, How to Dance in Ohio would have been just about perfect. As it is, at two hours and twenty-five minutes, its strengths are partially undone by its digressions.
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense for a man to deliver Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech, unless being turned into a eunuch is a previously unreported trigger for masculine aggression, but Patrick Page nevertheless begins his one-man show All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain (at the DR2 Theatre through February 25) with Mrs. M.’s prayer for the resolve to do evil, mainly because it’s too juicy for him to turn down. Page is a shameless ham who has spliced together a theatrical highlight reel of damnation and calumny spoken by the Bard’s most notable malefactors. Coming in from nowhere, detached from the stories in which they take place, these addresses have little dramatic pungency; the evening is more of an actor’s exercise and a tasting platter for some of Shakespeare’s most chilling lines. Page, who is best known for playing Hades for six years on Broadway in the musical Hadestown, which brought out his demonically low singing voice (he went as low as a G1 in the performance), is a longtime Shakespearean who, by putting a dozen of the most harrowing declamations in a single show, gets to bounce happily from Shylock to Iago to Macbeth to Prospero, tying the passages together with what amounts to a lecture on Shakespeare’s creative process and his legacy.
Page makes an enthusiastic case for the notion that Shakespeare advanced the concept of villainy as depicted in simple Elizabethan morality plays by making his miscreants seductive and enticing, burrowing into their psyches to imagine circumstances from within rather than simply denouncing them from without. Before the villain, Page reminds us, there was “the vice”—the character who stood for a sin, such as covetousness, and had no other dramatic function or interior motivation. Such symbol-men would simply tell us how evil they were and audiences would respond appropriately.
Page’s show—“this little séance,” he calls it, promising to conjure malevolent spirits—is diverting enough, balancing introductory information about Shakespeare (such as Macbeth’s reputation as “the cursed play,” hence the superstitious actorly preference for referring to it as “the Scottish tragedy”) with his own insights gleaned from many years of performance. Page is steeped in the theater, which means he is given to exaggeration for the sake of spectacle, and tells us he finds playing the villains “terrifying.” Really? Upon all evidence, he finds such work to be exhilarating. He comes across as a likably nerdy high-school teacher smitten with the Bard and trying his best to make his words exciting to a new generation in terms they might be able to relate to. So he rolls out mentions of House of Cards and Tony Soprano and tells us that the Bard’s works are all around us, in differing forms. True, if banal:
Any Trekkies in the house? OK, how about Star Wars fans? You may not agree on much, but you all agree on one thing—you simply expect your villains to have complex psychologies, believable backstories, and meaningful motivations, but none of that—none of it—existed before Shakespeare began writing in 1590. And all of it—every single bit—was firmly in place when he wrapped up his exploration of human evil in 1611. Twenty-one years to raise the villain from infancy to adulthood. How the hell did he do it? And what did he learn along the way?
All the Devils Are Here (from The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”) runs through a potted analysis of each of the great villains in chronological order, starting with the soon-to-be Richard III’s soliloquy, after murdering the titular king, in the third part of Henry VI. Ripped out of context, and without Henry lying bleeding out on the stage, the speech doesn’t carry nearly as much freight, but Page decides that his thundering can make up for the deficiency.
So the show, if it isn’t aimed at the devoted Shakespearean, is an amusing and punchy introduction for those who have only a passing familiarity with its subjects. Toward the end, Page hints at a more personal, and more interesting, piece, when he tells us that in portraying these villains he is moved not by the force of Shakespeare’s words but by the self-questioning tendencies they shake loose: “I have all their darkest qualities in me: Richard’s self-loathing, Shylock’s thirst for revenge, Malvolio’s ambition, Claudius’ cowardice.” If Page loathes himself, there is certainly no evidence of it in this play, which only a performer deeply in love with himself would have even dreamt of. Personal anecdotes of moral failure as related to the flaws of Shakespeare’s villains might have made a uniquely compelling evening, but this is as close as Page ever comes to exploring his own character. Otherwise, it’s all oration and gesticulation.