THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA


Boston Court Pasadena revitalizes Tennessee Williams’s last Broadway success with artistic director Jessica Kubzansky’s excitingly cast and powerfully performed The Night Of The Iguana.

Riley Shanahan stars as The Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, a disgraced but not quite defrocked Episcopal Priest so down on his luck, he’s been reduced to serving as tour guide to a busload of Texan Baptist school teachers traveling down the west coast of Mexico circa 1940.

Arriving at the rundown Costa Verde Hotel, Larry is greeted by the establishment’s recently widowed proprietor Maxine Faulk (Julanne Chidi Hill), an old friend whose first words to him may be a perceptive “How long have you been off the wagon?” but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to rekindle old times with her still smoldering if not entirely sober onetime flame.

Larry, meanwhile, has made another mess of his already messed up life by seducing underage passenger Charlotte Goodall (Isabella Feliciana), much to the dismay of her butch battleaxe aunt Miss Judith Fellowes (Ann Noble).

Sexual shenanigans are the last thing on the mind of Hannah Jelkes (Jully Lee), a 40ish spinster who’s shown up at the Costa Verde accompanied by her 97-year-old grandfather Jonathan Coffin (Dennis Dun), aka Nonno, aka “the world’s oldest living and practicing poet,” with hopes of selling enough of her watercolors to pay for their stay, a task more easily said than done.

If ever there was a combustible mix for dramatic fireworks, Larry, Maxine, and Hannah are that mix, and when you stir in a busload of German tourists there to flaunt their Aryanness and a couple of hunky Mexican houseboys there to satisfy both the hotel’s and Maxine’s needs, you’ve got Tennessee Williams’s last great (or greatish) play, and one that ought to be revived more often than it is, at least compared to The Glass Menagerie, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Under Kubzansky’s inspired direction, Shanahan burns up the stage as Larry, a powder keg of complex demons and desires primed to explode at any moment.

Hill’s bawdy, buxom African-American innkeeper down on her luck and lusting after a fallen man of God not only provides further evidence of Hill’s status as a bona fide L.A. stage treasure, it makes historical sense given that a significant number of Black Americans had taken up residence in Mexico in the 1940s due to the country’s less restrictive racial environment.

Not only that, but by casting Hannah and Nonno as Asian Americans, Kubzansky not only affords two superb actors the chance to shine in roles they might not have been considered for in decades past, the characters’ Asian-American identity adds nuances to their outsider status with Lee simply spellbinding as a woman whose seemingly brittle surface masks deep waters and Dun a heartbreakingly real Nonno.

Noble’s pinch-faced gorgon of a Judith and Feliciana’s teen-hormone-charged, Lawrence-obsessed Charlotte are terrific as well, and by trimming down the original Broadway cast of fourteen to ten actors in all, Noble and Feliciana (doubling as a couple of very blonde German tourists), Juan De La Cruz (as both houseboy Juan and tour guide Hank), and Christian Haines (as tour director Jake Latta and German tourist Herr Fahrenkopf) get to do dynamic double duty at Boston Court, with Michael G. Martinez (Pancho) and recent USC grad George Vagujhelyi (Wolfgang) completing the all-around fabulous cast.

Scenic designer Tesshi Nakagawa evokes the tropical squalor of Maxine’s dilapidated inn while allowing us to glimpse inside its ramshackle rooms, Denitsa Bliznakova’s costumes define each character to perfection, and Kaitlin Trimble’s lighting is at once dramatic and subtle.

Add to that John Zalewski’s evocative sound design and original compositions and Jenna Scordino myriad props and you’ve got a Boston Court production design to do Tennessee Williams proud.

 Eric Swartz is assistant director, Carly DW Bones is intimacy director, Edgar Landa is fight director, and Matthew Floyd Miller is dialect coach.

Jasmine Leung is stage manager, Jaclyn Gehringer is assistant stage manager, and Jasmine Kalra is production manager.

Casting is by Victor Vazquez, CSA. Luana Fontes understudies the roles of Charlotte and Hilda.

It’s been seven years since Boston Court Pasadena dazzled audiences with Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and if their The Night Of The Iguana is less radical a reinvention of a Williams classic than that production was, it is no less spellbinding a reminder that where American theater is concerned, 20th-century masters don’t get any more masterful than Tennessee.

Boston Court Pasadena, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena.
www.BostonCourtPasadena.org

–Steven Stanley
October 6, 2025
Photos: Brian Hashimoto

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