PULLMAN, Wash. — Washington State University Theatre brings Tennessee Williams’ drama “Night of the Iguana” to the R.R. Jones Theatre beginning April 9 for seven performances.
The WSU company, under the direction of faculty member Terry Converse, will bring the powerful classic to WSU for 8 p.m. curtains April 9-11 and 16-18. The drama also will be performed at 2 p.m. April 11.
“Night of the Iguana” is considered Williams’ most mature work. Within a broken down Mexican resort hotel, Williams has created a mood of pervading loneliness and despair, Converse said. The desolation is in his people: the tough, sex-starved widow who runs the hotel; Shannon, the neurotic defrocked minister; and the gentle maiden lady from New England. Thrown together, their human needs become explicit, and from their conflicts comes the realization that life must be endured and the spirit will somehow survive even beyond the limits of anguish.
The play’s most poignant moments grow out of the understanding of these people, their mutual need for companionship and roots, and their final movements of nobility in small gestures of unselfishness to aid one another.
Converse said the play is more of a darkened dreamscape than a conventional realistic play. Shannon’s dream is an attempt to compensate for his one-sidedness, a search for a reconciling symbol. All of the characters in the play are reflections and refractions of Shannon’s personality, and Shannon, as searcher, watches his own vices and virtues parade across the state of his consciousness.
General admission is $8 and discounts are available for senior citizens, WSU students and youth. Graduate students and their spouses are admitted without charge, courtesy of the Graduate and Professional Students Association. Seats are reserved.
Tickets are on sale starting Monday, April 6, from 12:30-5 p.m. in the Daggy Hall theater box office, 335-7236.
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