BACK
STAGE WEST
June
22, 2000
by
Rob Kendt
When
the defrocked minister Shannon turns back to look at Hannah Jelkes in the final
moments of The Night of the Iguana, he tells Maxine, the gal pal he's joining for
a swim and a probable affair, "I want to remember that face. I won't see
it again."
That's
all Shannon says by way of description--"that face." But when I saw
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's wrenching, lyrical production a few weeks
ago, I must have had some of kind of hallucination. I swear I heard another
line of dialogue describing the image of Hannah, standing in a doorway of the
Costa Verde Hotel, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the stars, as
something along the lines of "a picture of a saint in a cathedral."
At the time, it seemed an apt and moving comparison.
I've
since discovered there is no such line of dialogue in Night of the Iguana (which I'd never read
before seeing it). But there is a stage direction at Hannah's first entrance
that reads: "She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval
saint." A later stage direction refers to her as looking "like a
medieval sculpture of a saint." Had Tennessee Williams somehow spoken to
me directly through director Penny Metropulos' soulful rendition of his last
great play?
It's
just as possible that Suzanne Irving, who plays the not-quite-earthbound
artist/hustler Hannah, incarnates Williams' stage direction so perfectly that
it is she who achieved this extraordinary feat of communication. She's a lean,
fine-featured woman with an oval face and a sliver of a mouth; one could call
her affect patrician, especially with the prim Nantucket dialect she gives
Hannah. But that would overlook the tapering limbs and eerie poise that give
her the timeless look, indeed, of a religious icon--or, as Shannon calls her,
"Miss thin-standing-up Female-Buddha."
This
same strangely familiar physiognomy also seared into memory her performance as
the ghostly aviator figure in Tongue of a Bird, last year at OSF.
Irving's laser-like power and precision is of course not merely a matter of
appearance or vocal quality, but she does seem to be one of those actors whose
instrument is so integrally fused to her technique that she appears to be doing
something entirely her own, something either less or more than acting per se.
It's very easy to underrate this kind of actor, especially in the midst of a
company of powerhouses and chameleons like OSF's--but the proof is in the
remembering.
There's
not just that penultimate moment Shannon consciously tries to remember, thus
also sealing it for us. There is also the offhandedly meticulous way she brews
poppy-seed tea over a little fold-out burner, or the way she warms to Shannon's
dubious attentions, emerging from Hannah's flinty spinster shell to luxuriate
in a little soul exchange--though even this emergence has a measure of
painstaking delicacy about it.
This
last may be the key ingredient Irving brings to Hannah: a reserve that
suggests, sometimes slyly or coyly, stores of feeling not to be wasted or
freely spent but saved for those most in need, like her doddering poet
grandfather Nonno or the hapless, damaged Shannon. Though Hannah is flawed and
has her own lessons to learn, it is her role in the end to deliver a kind of
benediction for the dying world around her. Hannah embodies nothing less than
divine grace, and it's to Suzanne Irving's credit that she handles this tall
order so unsentimentally and, well, gracefully.