God Is - or Is He Not?

By T.E. Kalem

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

One of the undiluted pleasures of the Bicentennial year has been the multiple revivals of the plays of Tennessee Williams. The best of these dramas pos sess poetic eloquence, humanistic compassion and arresting vitality. It is to be hoped that one of these years the judges in Stockholm will confer upon Williams the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been accorded to only one U.S. play wright, Eugene O'Neill.

If the production of The Night of the Iguana now at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater lacks the luminosity of the 1962 original, it is admirable in its own right, with fresh shadings of interpretation. Four castaways at the end of the frayed rope of existence are thrown together on the steaming veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel in the deep-green sea of the Mexican jungle. At its core, the play asks whether they have been for gotten by God, cursed by God, stand in any hope of God's grace or whether God exists at all.

Each of the chief characters has a gallant last-ditch tenacity that is the mark of Williams' people. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Chamberlain) is a defrocked minister with a penchant for teen-age girls. The hotel proprietor, Maxine Faulk (Sylvia Miles), fancies young Mexican beachboys. The guardians of the spirit as opposed to the flesh are Hannah Jelkes (Dorothy McGuire), a Nantucket spinster, and her ancient 97-year-old poet grandfather Nonno (William Roerick), on whom Hannah's abiding love and care are centered.

At the heart of the play, Chamberlain captures the self-lacerating torment of Shannon, and McGuire the innate goodness of Hannah, but both are some what out of their depth where the play itself becomes deeper in certain late scenes and speeches that border on mys tical transcendence.

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