Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

Author:John Lahr [Lahr, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Literary
ISBN: 9780393021240
Google: CZS9AwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393021246
Barnesnoble: 0393021246
Goodreads: 20663684
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2014-09-21T23:00:00+00:00

Back in 1959, Frank Corsaro had asked Williams to contribute a one-act play to be performed as part of a double bill with William Inge’s The Tiny Closet at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Williams sent Corsaro a twenty-one-page sketch based on “The Night of the Iguana,” a short story he had written in 1946 inspired by his stint in Mexico after his heartrending breakup with Kip Kiernan. The story focused almost entirely on Miss Edith Jelkes, a hysterical, reclusive thirty-year-old Southern spinster who is living at a lonely, envious distance from the two other guests—gay writers—at a ramshackle Mexican hotel. Drawn to the older writer, Miss Jelkes intrudes into the couple’s solitary idyll:

“Your friend—” she faltered. “Mike?” “Is he the—right person for you?”

“Mike is helpless, and I am always attracted by helpless people.”

“But you,” she said awkwardly. “How about you? Don’t you need somebody’s help?”

“The help of God,” said the writer. “Failing that, I have to depend on myself.”

The older writer makes a clumsy pass at Miss Jelkes; she fights him off, but their brief botched sexual encounter severs “the strangling rope of her loneliness.” Her predicament is mirrored by the plight of an iguana, who has been cruelly caught and tethered under the hotel veranda and is finally cut free from his torture.

Corsaro found the characters two-dimensional—the writer was “a bit of a louse,” he recalled. He telephoned Williams to try to cajole him into giving them more depth. “As we’re talking, something is coming to me,” Williams replied. In Williams’s recalibration of the story into “an expression of my present, immediate psychological hassle,” as he described it to Corsaro, the tale became more about spiritual exhaustion than sexual frustration. Almost nothing of the original story ended up in the script, which Williams considered “more of a dramatic poem than a play.”

The Night of the Iguana deposits a defrocked-priest-turned-tour-guide, Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, on a hilltop in a tropical Mexican paradise, positioned strategically between the awe of creation and the awe of disintegration—news of world war is reported from the radios of some jocund German guests (who did not appear in the short story), the world is at a spiritual tipping point, and so is the feverish Shannon. As he climbs the hill to the Costa Verde Hotel, he is on the verge of a second nervous breakdown. Down below him, a busload of unhappy ladies from a Texas women’s college—“a football squad of old maids”—complain loudly about the tour, of “the underworlds of all places” that he has taken them on. Shannon is a kind of pilgrim, a “man of God, on vacation” who has lost his way, trying vainly to wrestle under control his lust for young girls and alcohol. Scrambling uphill for the solace of male company—the hotel’s owner, Fred Faulk—he is almost immediately walloped with more calamity: Fred has died, and Shannon comes face to face with Maxine, Fred’s predatory widow who has, in her newfound freedom, been entertaining herself with local youths.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.