Williams wrote: "This is a play about love in its purest terms." It is
also Williams's robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance
in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is
proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff
overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour
group of ladies from a West Texas women's college, the self-described
New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old
grandfather, Jonathan Coffin ("the world's oldest living and practicing
poet"), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by
its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and
turbulent night.
This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana
and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright,
the author's original Foreword, the short story "The Night of the
Iguana" which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted
Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch.
"I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile
delinquent--yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western
theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God
as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to
conduct services in praise and worship of this...this...this angry,
petulant old man."
--The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana
