The Night of the Iguana was presented at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961, by Charles Bowden, in association with Violla Rubber. It was directed by Frank Corsaro; the stage setting was designed by Oliver Smith; lighting by Jean Rosenthal; costumes by Noel Taylor; audio effects by Edward Beyer. The cast, in order of appearance, was as follows:
* * *
MAXINE FAULK Bette Davis
PEDRO James Farentino
PANCHO Christopher Jones
REVEREND SHANNON Patrick O’Neal
HANK Theseus George
HERR FAHRENKOPF Heinz Hohenwald
FRAU FAHRENKOPF Lucy Landau
WOLFGANG Bruce Glover
HILDA Laryssa Lauret
JUDITH FELLOWES Patricia Roe
HANNAH JELKES Margaret Leighton
CHARLOTTE GOODALL Lane Bradbury
JONATHAN COFFIN (NONNO) Alan Webb
JAKE LATTA Louis Guss
Production owned and presented by “The Night of the Iguana” Joint Venture (the joint venture consisting of Charles Bowden and Two Rivers Enterprises, Inc.).
And so, as kinsman met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
— EMILY DICKINSON
ACT ONE
As the curtain rises, there are sounds of a party of excited female tourists arriving by bus on the road down the hill below the Costa Verde Hotel. Mrs. Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of the hotel, comes around the turn of the verandah. She is a stout, swarthy woman in her middle forties—affable and rapaciously lusty. She is wearing a pair of Levis and a blouse that is half unbuttoned. She is followed by Pedro, a Mexican of about twenty—slim and attractive. He is an employee in the hotel and also her casual lover. Pedro is stuffing his shirt under the belt of his pants and sweating as if he had been working hard in the sun. Mrs. Faulk looks down the hill and is pleased by the sight of someone coming up from the tourist bus below.
* * *
MAXINE [calling out]: Shannon! [A man’s voice from below answers: “Hi!”] Hah! [Maxine always laughs with a single harsh, loud bark, opening her mouth like a seal expecting a fish to be thrown to it.] My spies told me that you were back under the border! [To Pedro.] Anda, hombre, anda!
[Maxine’s delight expands and vibrates in her as Shannon labors up the hill to the hotel. He does not appear on the jungle path for a minute or two after the shouting between them starts.]
MAXINE: Hah! My spies told me you went through Saltillo last week with a busload of women—a whole busload of females, all females, hah! How many you laid so far? Hah!
SHANNON [from below, panting]: Great Caesar’s ghost . . . stop . . . shouting!
MAXINE: No wonder your ass is draggin’, hah!
SHANNON: Tell the kid to help me up with this bag.
MAXINE [shouting directions]: Pedro! Anda—la maléta. Pancho, no seas flojo! Va y trae el equipaje del señor.
[Pancho, another young Mexican, comes around the verandah and trots down the jungle path. Pedro has climbed up a coconut tree with a machete and is chopping down nuts for rum-cocos.]
SHANNON [shouting, below]: Fred? Hey, Fred!
MAXINE [with a momentary gravity]: Fred can’t hear you, Shannon. [She goes over and picks up a coconut, shaking it against her ear to see if it has milk in it.]
SHANNON [still below]: Where is Fred—gone fishing?
[Maxine lops the end off a coconut with the machete, as Pancho trots up to the verandah with Shannon’s bag—a beat-up Gladstone covered with travel stickers from all over the world. Then Shannon appears, in a crumpled white linen suit. He is panting, sweating and wild-eyed. About thirty-five, Shannon is “black Irish.” His nervous state is terribly apparent; he is a young man who has cracked up before and is going to crack up again—perhaps repeatedly.]
MAXINE: Well! Lemme look at you!
SHANNON: Don’t look at me, get dressed!
MAXINE: Gee, you look like you had it!
SHANNON: You look like you been having it, too. Get dressed!
MAXINE: Hell, I’m dressed. I never dress in September. Don’t you know I never dress in September?
SHANNON: Well, just, just—button your shirt up.
MAXINE: How long you been off it, Shannon?
SHANNON: Off what?
MAXINE: The wagon . . .
SHANNON: Hell, I’m dizzy with fever. Hundred and three this morning in Cuernavaca.
MAXINE: Watcha got wrong with you?
SHANNON: Fever . . . fever . . . Where’s Fred?
MAXINE: Dead.
SHANNON: Did you say dead?
MAXINE: That’s what I said. Fred is dead.
SHANNON: How?
MAXINE: Less’n two weeks ago, Fred cut his hand on a fishhook, it got infected, infection got in his blood stream, and he was dead inside of forty-eight hours. [To Pancho.] Vete!
SHANNON: Holy smoke. . . .
MAXINE: I can’t quite realize it yet. . . .
SHANNON: You don’t seem—inconsolable about it.
MAXINE: Fred was an old man, baby. Ten years older’n me. We hadn’t had sex together in. . . .
SHANNON: What’s that got to do with it?
MAXINE: Lie down and have a rum-coco.
SHANNON: No, no. I want a cold beer. If I start drinking rum-cocos now I won’t stop drinking rum-cocos. So Fred is dead? I looked forward to lying in this hammock and talking to Fred.
MAXINE: Well Fred’s not talking now, Shannon. A diabetic gets a blood infection, he goes like that without a decent hospital in less’n a week. [A bus horn is heard blowing from below.] Why don’t your busload of women come on up here? They’re blowing the bus horn down there.
SHANNON: Let ’em blow it, blow it. . . . [He sways a little.] I got a fever. [He goes to the top of the path, divides the flowering bushes and shouts down the hill to the bus.] Hank! Hank! Get them out of the bus and bring ’em up here! Tell ’em the rates are OK. Tell ’em the. . . . [His voice gives out, and he stumbles back to the verandah, where he sinks down onto the low steps, panting.] Absolutely the worst party I’ve ever been out with in ten years of conducting tours. For God’s sake, help me with ’em because I can’t go on. I got to rest here a while. [She gives him a cold beer.] Thanks. Look and see if they’re getting out of the bus. [She crosses to the masking foliage and separates it to look down the hill.] Are they getting out of the bus or are they staying in it, the stingy—daughters of—bitches. . . . Schoolteachers at a Baptist Female College in Blowing Rock, Texas. Eleven, eleven of them.
MAXINE: A football squad of old maids.
SHANNON: Yeah, and I’m the football. Are they out of the bus?
MAXINE: One’s gotten out—she’s going into the bushes.
SHANNON: Well, I’ve got the ignition key to the bus in my pocket—this pocket—so they can’t continue without me unless they walk.
MAXINE: They’re still blowin’ that horn.
SHANNON: Fantastic. I can’t lose this party. Blake Tours has put me on probation because I had a bad party last month that tried to get me sacked and I am now on probation with Blake Tours. If I lose this party I’ll be sacked for sure . . . Ah, my God, are they still all in the bus? [He heaves himself off the steps and staggers back to the path, dividing the foliage to look down it, then shouts.] Hank! Get them out of the busssss! Bring them up heeee-re!
HANK’S VOICE [from below]: They wanta go back in toooooowwww-n.
SHANNON: They can’t go back in toooowwwwn!—Whew—Five years ago this summer I was conducting round-the-world tours for Cook’s. Exclusive groups of retired Wall Street financiers. We traveled in fleets of Pierce Arrows and Hispano Suizas.—Are they getting out of the bus?
MAXINE: You’re going to pieces, are you?
SHANNON: No! Gone! Gone! [He rises and shouts down the hill again.] Hank! Come up here! Come on up here a minute! I wanta talk to you about this situation!—Incredible, fantastic . . .
[He drops back on the steps, his head falling into his hands.]
MAXINE: They’re not getting out of the bus.—Shannon . . . you’re not in a nervous condition to cope with this party, Shannon, so let them go and you stay.
SHANNON: You know my situation: I lose this job, what’s next? There’s nothing lower than Blake Tours, Maxine honey.—Are they getting out of the bus? Are they getting out of it now?
MAXINE: Man’s comin’ up the hill.
SHANNON: Aw. Hank. You gotta help me with him.
MAXINE: I’ll give him a rum-coco.
[Hank comes grinning onto the verandah.]
HANK: Shannon, them ladies are not gonna come up here, so you better come on back to the bus.
SHANNON: Fantastic.—I’m not going down to the bus and I’ve got the ignition key to the bus in my pocket. It’s going to stay in my pocket for the next three days.
HANK: You can’t get away with that, Shannon. Hell, they’ll walk back to town if you don’t give up the bus key.
SHANNON: They’d drop like flies from sunstrokes on that road. . . . Fantastic, absolutely fantastic . . . [Panting and sweating, he drops a hand on Hank’s shoulder.] Hank, I want your co-operation. Can I have it? Because when you’re out with a difficult party like this, the tour conductor—me—and the guide—you—have got to stick together to control the situations as they come up against us. It’s a test of strength between two men, in this case, and a busload of old wet hens! You know that, don’t you?
HANK: Well. . . . [He chuckles.] There’s this kid that’s crying on the back seat all the time, and that’s what’s rucked up the deal. Hell, I don’t know if you did or you didn’t, but they all think that you did ‘cause the kid keeps crying.
SHANNON: Hank? Look! I don’t care what they think. A tour conducted by T. Lawrence Shannon is in his charge, completely—where to go, when to go, every detail of it. Otherwise I resign. So go on back down there and get them out of that bus before they suffocate in it. Haul them out by force if necessary and herd them up here. Hear me? Don’t give me any argument about it. Mrs. Faulk, honey? Give him a menu, give him one of your sample menus to show the ladies. She’s got a Chinaman cook here, you won’t believe the menu. The cook’s from Shanghai, handled the kitchen at an exclusive club there. I got him here for her, and he’s a bug, a fanatic about—whew!—continental cuisine . . . can even make beef Strogonoff and thermidor dishes. Mrs. Faulk, honey? Hand him one of those—whew!—one of those fantastic sample menus. [Maxine chuckles, as if perpetrating a practical joke, as she hands him a sheet of paper.] Thanks. Now, here. Go on back down there and show them this fantastic menu. Describe the view from the hill, and . . . [Hank accepts the menu with a chuckling shake of the head.] And have a cold Carta Blanca and. . . .
HANK: You better go down with me.
SHANNON: I can’t leave this verandah for at least forty-eight hours. What in blazes is this? A little animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch?
[The German family which is staying at the hotel, the Fahrenkopfs, their daughter and son-in-law, suddenly make a startling, dreamlike entrance upon the scene. They troop around the verandah, then turn down into the jungle path. They are all dressed in the minimal concession to decency and all are pink and gold like baroque cupids in various sizes—Rubensesque, splendidly physical. The bride, Hilda, walks astride a big inflated rubber horse which has an ecstatic smile and great winking eyes. She shouts “Horsey, horsey, giddap!” as she waddles astride it, followed by her Wagnerian-tenor bridegroom, Wolfgang, and her father, Herr Fahrenkopf, a tank manufacturer from Frankfurt. He is carrying a portable short-wave radio, which is tuned in to the crackle and guttural voices of a German broadcast reporting the Battle of Britain. Frau Fahrenkopf, bursting with rich, healthy fat and carrying a basket of food for a picnic at the beach, brings up the rear. They begin to sing a Nazi marching song.
SHANNON: Aw—Nazis. How come there’s so many of them down here lately?
MAXINE: Mexico’s the front door to South America—and the back door to the States, that’s why.
SHANNON: Aw, and you’re setting yourself up here as a receptionist at both doors, now that Fred’s dead? [Maxine comes over and sits down on him in the hammock.] Get off my pelvis before you crack it. If you want to crack something, crack some ice for my forehead. [She removes a chunk of ice from her glass and massages his forehead with it.]—Ah, God. . . .
MAXINE [chuckling]: Ha, so you took the young chick and the old hens are squawking about it, Shannon?
SHANNON: The kid asked for it, no kidding, but she’s seventeen—less, a month less’n seventeen. So it’s serious, it’s very serious, because the kid is not just emotionally precocious, she’s a musical prodigy, too.
MAXINE: What’s that got to do with it?
SHANNON: Here’s what it’s got to do with it, she’s traveling under the wing, the military escort, of this, this—butch vocal teacher who organizes little community sings in the bus. Ah, God! I’m surprised they’re not singing now, they must’ve already suffocated. Or they’d be singing some morale-boosting number like “She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” or “Pop Goes the Weasel.”—Oh, God. . . . [Maxine chuckles up and down the scale.] And each night after supper, after the complaints about the supper and the check-up on the checks by the math instructor, and the vomiting of the supper by several ladies, who have inspected the kitchen—then the kid, the canary, will give a vocal recital. She opens her mouth and out flies Carrie Jacobs Bond or Ethelbert Nevin. I mean after a day of one indescribable torment after another, such as three blowouts, and a leaking radiator in Tierra Caliente. . . . [He sits up slowly in the hammock as these recollections gather force.] And an evening climb up sierras, through torrents of rain, around hairpin turns over gorges and chasms measureless to man, and with a thermos-jug under the driver’s seat which the Baptist College ladies think is filled with ice water but which I know is filled with iced tequila—I mean after such a day has finally come to a close, the musical prodigy, Miss Charlotte Goodall, right after supper, before there’s a chance to escape, will give a heartbreaking and earsplitting rendition of Carrie Jacobs Bond’s “End of a Perfect Day”—with absolutely no humor. . . .
MAXINE: Hah!
SHANNON: Yeah, “Hah!” Last night—no, night before last, the bus burned out its brake linings in Chilpancingo. This town has a hotel . . . this hotel has a piano, which hasn’t been tuned since they shot Maximilian. This Texas songbird opens her mouth and out flies “I Love You Truly,” and it flies straight at me, with gestures, all right at me, till her chaperone, this Diesel-driven vocal instructor of hers, slams the piano lid down and hauls her out of the mess hall. But as she’s hauled out Miss Bird-Girl opens her mouth and out flies, “Larry, Larry, I love you, I love you truly!” That night, when I went to my room, I found that I had a roommate.
MAXINE: The musical prodigy had moved in with you?
SHANNON: The spook had moved in with me. In that hot room with one bed, the width of an ironing board and about as hard, the spook was up there on it, sweating, stinking, grinning up at me.
MAXINE: Aw, the spook. [She chuckles.] So you’ve got the spook with you again.
SHANNON: That’s right, he’s the only passenger that got off the bus with me, honey.
MAXINE: Is he here now?
SHANNON: Not far.
MAXINE: On the verandah?
SHANNON: He might be on the other side of the verandah. Oh, he’s around somewhere, but he’s like the Sioux Indians in the Wild West fiction, he doesn’t attack before sundown, he’s an after-sundown shadow. . . .
[Shannon wriggles out of the hammock as the bus horn gives one last, long protesting blast.]
MAXINE:
I have a little shadow
That goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him
Is more than I can see.
He’s very, very like me,
From his heels up to his head,
And he always hops before me r />
When I hop into my bed.
SHANNON: That’s the truth. He sure hops in the bed with me.
MAXINE: When you’re sleeping alone, or . . . ?
SHANNON: I haven’t slept in three nights.
MAXINE: Aw, you will tonight, baby.
[The bus horn sounds again. Shannon rises and squints down the hill at the bus.]
SHANNON: How long’s it take to sweat the faculty of a Baptist Female College out of a bus that’s parked in the sun when it’s a hundred degrees in the shade?
MAXINE: They’re staggering out of it now.
SHANNON: Yeah, I’ve won this round, I reckon. What’re they doing down there, can you see?
MAXINE: They’re crowding around your pal Hank.
SHANNON: Tearing him to pieces?
MAXINE: One of them’s slapped him, he’s ducked back into the bus, and she is starting up here.
SHANNON: Oh, Great Caesar’s ghost, it’s the butch vocal teacher.
MISS FELLOWES [in a strident voice, from below]: Shannon! Shannon!
SHANNON: For God’s sake, help me with her.
MAXINE: You know I’ll help you, baby, but why don’t you lay off the young ones and cultivate an interest in normal grown-up women?
MISS FELLOWES [her voice coming nearer]: Shannon!
SHANNON [shouting down the hill]: Come on up, Miss Fellowes, everything’s fixed. [To Maxine.] Oh, God, here she comes chargin’ up the hill like a bull elephant on a rampage!