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The Night of the Iguana is the last of Tennessee Williams’ major artistic, critical, and box office successes. First per formed on Broadway in 1961, The Night of the Iguana won Williams his fourth New York Drama Critics Award and received a Tony nomination as Best Play. Set in the 1940s at a seedy resort on the west coast of Mexico, the play revolves around former Episcopalian minister Lawrence Shannon, who has been defrocked for various improprieties. Now a tour guide, he leads a busload of middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast. Within the broken-down environs of a cheap resort hotel, Shannon spars with the sex-starved widow (Maxine) who owns the hotel, and a gentle New England spinster (Hannah), all the while coming to terms with the failure haunting his life. This is a powerful play, as Shannon grapples with and confronts his darkest personal demons, pursuing the essential human need for forgiveness and redemption.

Director James Aday adds these comments:

“Unlike many of Williams' plays, The Night of the Iguana ends on a positive, hopeful note; a note perhaps more representative of Williams himself. As one of his many surrogates, Williams allows the Reverend Shannon to speak for him when he says: “The whole world, God’s world, has been the range of my travels…. And I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see! – the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, ever!” As an unnamed critic in Time magazine wrote, ''Purists of the craft may object that, strictly speaking, The Night of the Iguana does not go anywhere. In the deepest sense, it does not need to. It is already there, at the moving, tormented heart of the human condition."

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