Two From Williams' Menagerie

...On however melodramatic a level, a great deal more was going on in Summer and Smoke...

...In his ostensibly and ostentatiously outspoken but in fact not honestly enlightening Memoirs, Williams tells that in 1940, the period of Iguana, he was staying near Acapulco at the Hotel Costa Verde, the scene of the action...

...the crucial non-consummation scene in the cheap hotel, where John unconvincingly rejects Alma's advances, leaves a particularly aching gap in the structure...

...The current revival at the Circle in the Square (imported, with some modifications, from Los Angeles) is directed by Joseph Hardy and has one strong suit in Dorothy Mc-Guire's Hannah...

...The other half of the main dramatis personae comprises Maxine, the tough, just widowed, randy hotel proprietress, and the Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon, an Episcopal minister from Texas debarred after his first year for seducing a minor and preaching a sermon against the established notion of God as a "senile delinquent...

...The play's German tourists, jubilant about the London blitz, were there in reality, as was a group of young students with whom Williams went swimming...

...As I wrote in my review of the original 1961 production, Hannah and Shannon "pay each other the supreme tribute two Williamsian characters can pay: They tell each other their life stories...

...The same cannot be said for the Shannon of Richard Chamberlain, who goes through all the externals of emotion and even passion in a performance that might really be controlled by a set of buttons and switches built into the lighting board...

...It is still cut from the good old cloth even if the tailoring has become sloppy...

...Nor would these Nazis be singing "The Lorelei," proscribed by Goebbels as non-Aryan...

...But there remains as evident as ever that unfortunate, heavy-handed symbolism of the iguana, representing both the tied-up Shannon and humanity in general at the end of its rope...

...Not so...

...the worst set of the season, both cluttered and totally unevocative, by William Ritman...

...The background of the play is filled in by a couple of young Mexican employes who are Maxine's studs, the Nazi tourists, the bus driver, and a man from the travel agency there to fire Shannon and take over as tour guide...

...They eke out a living, she by selling her water-colors and doing sketches of tourists, he by reciting his old poetry, since he can no longer write...

...but he is also prey to feelings of dejection and cannot bear beir.g alone...

...As in Iguana, Williams provides far too simplistic explanations for his creatures' neuroses?a schematic overinvolvement with the parent of the opposite sex complicated, not very subtly or interestingly, by an aborted relationship to God...

...The casting of very un-Hispanic types as the hotel boys, and equally unconvincing Germans whose dialogue, moreover, has been pared to the bone, does not help matters...

...as John's viciously doting mother, Nan Martin was almost more fluttery and hysterical than Alma herself...

...the original had much more texture, variety, intensity and, yes, steaminess...

...Though typical of many homosexual lives, this casual promiscuity is by no means limited to them...

...Nightingale comes across as a pale outline of a play...

...M J^issing from the production, too, is the torrid steaminess that, when Williams now tries to expunge it by rewriting his plays, only leaves them diminished...

...as a raging neurotic, her sarcasm...

...The Nazis, imperceptively berated as irrelevant to the play by most critics, are in fact important in creating the mood of Gotterdammerung Williams is after...

...but, then, except for her extraordinary tolerance for the aberrations loneliness begets, Hannah is not all that different from those heroines...

...The duality of that phrase is significant both for this play and for Williams in general: He wants his surroundings wild yet populated...

...If only the symbolism could be cut loose from Williams' plays...

...And, at the other end of the scale, there often appears in Williams the pure and virginal young woman—sometimes sweetly resigned, sometimes neurotic and hysterical—the resigned archetype being Laura Wing-field in The Glass Menagerie...

...not even very good, I dare say...

...In this case, the production was in every way substandard too: pedestrian direction by Ed Sherin...

...This sad fact was confirmed by the first Broadway production of Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Williams' 1964 reworking of his 1948 Summer and Smoke...

...As a note to the text states, the area "had not yet become the Las Vegas and Miami Beach of Mexico," and between the still-water beach of Puerto Barrio and the rain forest above it lay one of "the world's wildest and loveliest populated places...

...The best looking of the youths, whom Williams unsuccessfully tried to seduce, may have been the prototype of Charlotte, the love-sick teen-ager...

...As Alma's authoritarian father, Shep-perd Strudwick was wooden as usual, not even attempting a Southern accent...

...Otherwise she is wonderful: luminous without becoming unduly ethereal, sweet yet uncloying, and conveying through the rhythms and emphases of her delivery the exact thoughts and feelings behind her lines...

...and utterly onesided performances by Betsy Palmer and David Selby in the leads...

...He is approaching one of his periodic nervous breakdowns—having to do with his lost faith in God, people and himself, not to mention an excessive faith in liquor—and seeking the recuperative support of Maxine's establishment, out of season and therefore unencumbered by more than a handful of tourists...

...I doubt whether Williams is aware of this, but the pair resemble Goethe's Harfenspieler and Mignon...

...He is now a tourist guide with a busload of Texas women in tow, all angry because he has exposed them to countless unscheduled discomforts along the way and seduced the youngest of the lot, not yet 17...

...Even if they cannot join their far too divergent selves, they can at least achieve respect for another's antipodal misery, and draw from the realization a wistful fortitude...

...As a potential lover, perhaps husband, he gets Maxine's sympathy...

...This one is altogether overlong anyway, having (like other Williams dramas) grown from a short story into a one-acter, and thence into three acts...

...As Maxine, Sylvia Miles reveals no feelings at all, merely cheap self-indulgence unrelated to anyone or anything around her, and that in a thin, whiny voice and a New York accent totally unsuited to an expatriate who has been steadily living in Mexico...

...One can find the theme of fleeting, generally sexual associations as a compromise between the demands of commitment and the fear of loneliness throughout Williams' works, the best known example being Blanche DuBois' famous line about having always depended on the kindness of strangers...

...the hero and heroine had flesh-and-blood complexities rather than being stripped down to single characteristics, and those insufficiently analyzed...

...The subject of Iguana is really loneliness and what, if anything, can be done about it...

...The only trouble with Miss McGuire is that she is too warm, womanly and pretty to be quite believable in so dry a part...

...but decent...

...In life, unlike in the play, nobody cut it loose...

...There, too, were the hammocks and rum-cocos, the hotel proprietress, and, above all, the captive iguana being fattened for eating...

...The focal point is a long nocturnal tete-a-tete between Shannon and Hannah, during part of which he is tied down to stop him from trying to "swim to China" or other violence, and during all of which this fierce and lecherous man confronts a wise and sympathetic but eccentrically chaste woman in growing mutual regard?a kind of platonic one-night stand...

...There are, accordingly, painful longueurs here along with sparks of genius, adding poignancy to the awesomely autobiographical line that has Hannah describing Shannon as "a man of God, on vacation...

...As Nonno (the Italian for grandfather that Miss McGuire keeps pronouncing "Nano," meaning dwarf), William Roerick is too big, young and healthy, and sadly lacks the otherworldly brittleness and sly, old man's wit Alan Webb brought to the part when creating it...

...He was broke and awaiting a oheck that was slow to arrive, and thus shared in the anxieties of three out of the four principal characters...

...For Williams, like so many of his characters, needs to get away from the city and the obligations its people entail...

...Of this sort, too, is Hannah Jelkes, the middle-aged New England spinster of Iguana, who ceaselessly travels about with her grandfather (Nonno, she calls him), a once well-known minor poet now "97 years young...

...After that comes a depressing sequence of ever-worse works in which a glimmer of the former great talent can only occasionally be detected amid the debris...

...In a prefatory note to the published text, he declares it "a better work than the play from which it derives...

...H. H. Poindexter's scenery and lighting will serve, although certain details of local color are lost, possibly in transfer from a proscenium to an arena stage...

...This may surprise, coming from someone who has played goody-goody heroines all her life—not excluding the Virgin Mary...

...Much more serious is the absence of energy in Joseph Hardy's staging: The production mostly plods along listlessly, and is particularly devoid of atmospheric ingredients specifically called for by the text, such as the off-stage marimba band...