NEWS & EVENTS • NEW TITLES • CATALOG • ABOUT US • CONTACT • PROFESSORS • BLOGS • NEWSLETTER

Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana
Introduction by Doug Wright
Drama
Online Ordering
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1852-8

Tennessee 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 ("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 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.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): New Directions publishes his letters, short stories, poems, fiction, essays and over sixty of his plays including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending.

Doug Wright is the author of I Am My Own Wife, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 2004, and the Obie Award-winning play Quills.

"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