Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: โThis is a play about love in its purest terms.โ It is also Williamsโs 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 womenโs college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (โthe worldโs oldest living and practicing poetโ), 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 authorโs original Foreword, the short story โThe Night of the Iguanaโ which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch.
โIโm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquentโyeah, thatโs 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 thisโฆthisโฆthis angry, petulant old man.โ
ย ย ย ย ย ย โThe Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana