* September, 1990
GREAT AMERICAN CLASSICS OPEN· NEW SEASON! "Tennessee Williams' plays will not disappear from our theaters, our memories, or our feelings. Who in our time was ever more universally admired?" Elia Kazan, Director of Williams' Pulitzer Prize winners, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Among the enduring gifts that Tennessee Williams has left to the international stage is his passionate., most spiritual play, The Night Of The Iguana, which opens the Public Theater's new season on September 27. Rich with Williams' unforgettable characters, unexpected jolts of humor, and lyrical imagery and language, Iguana was praised as a compassionate "cry from the heart" (Time magazine) when it opened on Broadway in 1961 with Bette Davis, Patrick O'Neal and Margaret Leighton. Winner of Williams' fourth:New York Drama Critics Circle ,Award, Iguana followed his many other: suc~esses: The Glass Menagerie, A Street(jar Named Desire, Summer And Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird Of Youth. Today Williams' work basks in a fascinating and far-reaching revival. A national tour of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, starring Kathleen Turner, visited Pittsburgh on its way to Broadway. And in the spirit of glasnost, Iguana was mounted last year in the Soviet Union, where it toured Siberia and played at Moscow's revered Maly Theater. Director Theodore Mann discovered Soviet actors, long deprived of freedom of religion, were "swept away by Williams' strong religious undertow . . . moving them even to the point of tears." For Williams, Iguana is an unusually "hopeful" play whose theme is "how to live beyond despair." No stranger himself to despair, Williams wrote mostly about his "soulmates" -outsiders and misfits, men and women apart from themselves and society. More universally, however, he believed that we are "all prisoners within our own skins, with the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude." Vividly etched characters, like those found in Iguana, are pure Tennessee Williams. ''They're what I- like best about the man," says Claude Purdy, director of the Public's production. Purdy, who
Tennessee Williams' The Night Of The Iguana Opens September 27.
on vacation," having committed several indiscretions. As a man in whom gentleness and savagery are delicately balanced, the world-weary minister is on the br~k of hysteria.
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Three Public Theater favorites return in Iguana: Olivia Williams, Marco St. John and Helena Ruoti.
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has admired Williams since he was an acting student, directed last year's successful August Wilson plays, Fences and Joe Turner's Come And Gone at the Publi~. "Iguana demands extraordinary actors," says the Public's Producing Director Bill Gardner, "and we have cast the best." Marco St. John, who starred at the Public Theater in Horton Foote's The Habitation Of Dragons, will be the tormented Shannon, a disgraced Episcopal minister. Helena Ruoti, a Public favorite who starred last season in Reckless and Burn This, will play the undaunted Hannah. And hotblooded Maxine will be played by Olivia Williams, the kind-hearted proprietress, Bertha Holly, in Joe Turner's Come And Gone. In 1940 at i~c._;~ta Verde., a run-down ·hotel in the steamy jungles on the west coast of Mexico, a priest, painter and poet converge-seeking not only shelter, but refuge from themselves. The
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Elearwr director Mel Shapiro and Fences actor John Henry Redwood return as playwrights. Page 5.
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