The “Errores” in Tennessee Williams’ Play “The Night of the Iguana”
Earlier this month, New York City’s La Femme Theatre Productions brought 1961’s The Night of the Iguana back to life. In this era of pandemic protocols, the Tennessee Williams play was not performed on stage, but instead, presented as a pre-recorded reading and streamed online (Dec. 2–6) with all proceeds to benefit the Actors Fund.
The cast for what is considered Williams’ last great play (something that could be disputed due to, as I will show shortly, a libretto with serious linguistic and cultural flaws, plus subsequent plays that are just as fascinating) included Dylan McDermott and Phylicia Rashad.
McDermott played the disgraced Reverend Dr. T Lawrence Shannon, who struggled spiritually — and with women — until one stormy night at the rundown Costa Verde hotel on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, when he could not escape confronting all his demons. The lodge is run by a carefree, exuberant American widow, Maxine Faulk (Rashad), whose husband Fred was Shannon’s friend. Shannon, trying to recover from a mental breakdown and eking out an existence as a tour operator, is accused of statutory rape after having a relationship with a minor, 16-year-old Charlotte, who accompanies the group of ladies he’s been leading on a tour. Into this drama, and his heart, a single woman by the name of Hannah, a painter, makes her way.
The play made its debut on Broadway 59 years ago on a day like today, December 28. That production starred Patrick O’ Neal as Rev. Shannon, Bette Davis as Maxine, and Margaret Leighton as Hannah. After four months, Davis left and was replaced by Shelley Winters.
Ever since, The Night of the Iguana has been performed on major stages several times, including in 1976 with Richard Chamberlain (Shannon), Sylvia Miles (Maxine), and Dorothy McGuire (Hannah), and as recently as 2019 in London with Clive Owen in the role of the reverend, who was somewhat based on an actual relative of the playwright.
But it’s perhaps the 1964 movie version of the play, directed by John Huston and starring Richard Burton in the role of the former minister, Ava Gardner as the flamboyant widow, Deborah Kerr as the chaste and noble artist, and Sue Lyon as the precocious Charlotte, that is most remembered today.
The critically-lauded film also became known for drawing attention to the then sleepy town of Puerto Vallarta, where filming took place, and along with the scandalous romance of its leading star, Richard Burton, with actress Elizabeth Taylor, turned the area into one overrun by paparazzi and eventually, a worldwide-known destination.
To stand in for the hotel, Huston built a “posada” from scratch on the southern coast of Puerto Vallarta, the Mismaloya beach, which also featured a fishing village and jungle. Williams himself had visited a hotel, the Costa Verde, outside Acapulco in the 1940s, that would serve as the inspiration for what would first be a short story, then a one-act version of the play, and finally, the three-act work that we’ve come to know.
In the cinematic version, Huston wisely took out two minor characters, German Nazi tourists, that other than to reflect a bit of the world’s political situation at the time Williams was in Mexico, healing from romantic heartbreak, in the 1940s, didn’t add much to the story. What the director failed to succeed at (or allowed) was reigning in the melodramatic Burton, whose performance is histrionic, while Kerr’s is saintly and subdued. Only Gardner comes out shining in an acting style that is still praiseworthy today for being more modern than theatrical.
A problem that Huston did avoid was with the Spanish lines from the play, and those that made it into the final script.
Perhaps Gardner, who knew some Spanish because she had lived in Spain since the 1950s, or Huston, who worked on the script with screenwriter and producer Anthony Veiller, or someone close to them with enough knowledge of the language, caught on to the fact that, when it came to the play’s Spanish dialogue, Williams’ español needed lots of corrections.
Uttered mostly by the character of Maxine, as presented in the film the Spanish lines are fine. A closer inspection of the original Williams play, however, reveals all sorts of lapses in Spanish grammar, punctuation, and even cultural finesse.
One of my pet peeves has always been with Hollywood productions that hire Latino actors to play Spanish-speaking roles in an otherwise English-language movie, and when they’re supposed to reflect a specific nationality, they seldom get the accent right. It’s as if producers, the director, casting agents, etc. think that, for example, having Spanish star Penélope Cruz playing a Colombian is enough since the Spanish language must sound the same regardless of the region or the country. But it doesn’t. The same thing has happened quite often with writers who write in English but insert Spanish erroneously.
Scholars have written about the Hispanic presence in Williams’ plays, from characters to settings, but not about the fact that in The Night of the Iguana, most of what the playwright wrote in Spanish was flawed.
How could this have happened?
Williams shared his love for all things Hispanic in his heartfelt 1961 essay “A Summer of Discovery,” about his time in Mexico; and one of the great loves of his life was a Mexican himself. So, surely someone with a knowledge of Spanish must’ve seen the manuscript, or could’ve been consulted? Or not?
This past summer, the following observations about Williams’ Spanish flaws in The Night of the Iguana were sent to The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, which holds the copyrights to the plays, screenplays, poems, letters, and stories written by the author after he left the estate to the university. These observations were made in the hopes that future printings of the play will do justice to the Spanish language. The corrections were made based on The Night of the Iguana’s SIGNET Books edition from June 1964.
ACT ONE
Page 9:
· At the end of the first paragraph spoken by Maxine: In Spanish, exclamatory and interrogative sentences take marks at the beginning and end of the sentences, unlike English, where these punctuation marks only go at the end. Perhaps one way to solve this stylistic discrepancy in the text could be to leave the single exclamation mark in the dialogue when it is surrounded by other words in English. And when the dialogue is all in Spanish, put both marks.
MAXINE [calling out]: … [to PEDRO] ¡Anda, hombre, anda!
Page 10:
MAXINE [shouting directions]: ¡Pedro! Anda — la maleta. ¡Pancho, no seas flojo! Ve y trae el equipaje del señor.
· The appropriate imperative form here should be “ve” and not “va.”
Page 20:
MAXINE [to PANCHO]: ¡Llévala al teléfono!
Page 25:
MAXINE [shouting]: ¡Pedro! ¡Pancho! ¡Muchachos! ¡Lleven las maletas al anexo! ¡Pronto!
· The verb “llevar” for “take” or “bring” the luggage to the annex works better here. It is now conjugated properly as well.
· The word used by the author to refer to an annex, anejo, is not common in Mexico. The word employed there, and in most of the Spanish-speaking world, is anexo.
Page 31:
MISS FELLOWES [wild with rage]: We’re going to drive back to A-ca-pul-co!
· The way the character breaks up the word Acapulco into syllables in the text does not work in Spanish. The correct division is A-ca-pul-co.
MISS FELLOWES: I’ll be right back… You! Boys! ¡Muchachos!
Page 38:
MAXINE [calling from the back]: ¿Pancho?
…
MAXINE: … Dile a Herr Fahrenkopf que de la embajada alemana lo llaman por teléfono… ¡Corre, corre! … ¡Corre, corre!
· Original sentence in Spanish was awkward. It has been rewritten now to sound more natural while remaining faithful to the meaning in English.
Page 41:
SHANNON [shouting to PANCHO]: Bring up her luggage. Tú, flojo… las maletas … bajo las palmas. ¡Vamos!
· The personal pronoun for you in Spanish, “tú,” takes an accent mark.
· The luggage is hidden under the palm trees, “bajo,” not “baja” las palmas.
ACT TWO
Page 63:
PEDRO: ¡Tenemos fiesta!
…
PEDRO: ¡Dámela, dámela! Yo la ataré.
PANCHO: Yo la cogí — — — ¡yo la ataré!
Pedro has a line now in Spanish, which is all correct. Then Maxine speaks.
MAXINE: ¡Amárrala fuerte! ¡Olé, olé! No la dejes escapar. ¡Déjala moverse!
· In the text, Maxine says Déjala moverse! but this expression, which means “Let it move!”, does not fit in with the rest of the dialogue. She first tells Pancho to “strongly tie” the iguana, so that it will not escape. But adding “Let it move!” is a contradiction then. Either the iguana is tied up and cannot move, or it can move.
Suggestion: Unless there is an original version of this dialogue in English that the author had with the precise meaning of what he intended the character to say in Spanish, the expression Déjala moverse! should be taken out. It only makes the text confusing.
Another suggestion: ¡Olé, olé! is a common, if perhaps somewhat clichéd, expression of approval used in Spain, not in Mexico. It began as an interjection used in bullfighting. Unless we knew more about Maxine and her proficiency in Spanish, and where she learned it, it sounds like a cultural stereotype attached to the way the character expresses herself. Since the days of Mexican independence, a pejorative word has been used towards Spaniards, “gachupines,” because they had oppressed and exploited Mexicans for generations. So, in a cultural context, it wouldn’t seem appropriate for Maxine to use “¡Olé, olé!” Also: Although at times pronounced by emphasizing the letter o verbally, when written, the word takes an accent mark on the letter e.
Page 65:
SHANNON: ¿Qué? ¿Qué?
MAXINE: ¡Vete!
…
MAXINE: ¡Cógela! ¡Cógela! ¿La cogiste? Si no la coges, te morderá el culo. ¿La cogiste?
PEDRO: La cogí.
· The verb is “coger,” and for most of its conjugations, it takes the letter g, not the j.
Page 71:
SHANNON [to the Mexican boys]: ¡Servicio! ¡Aquí!
Page 82:
MAXINE: ¡Pronto, pronto, muchachos! ¡Pronto, pronto! ¡Llévense todas las cosas! ¡Pronto, pronto! ¡Recojan los platos! ¡Apúrense con el mantel!
PEDRO: ¡Nos estamos dando prisa!
PANCHO: ¡Que el chubasco lave los platos!
· In the text, Maxine uses the word “llevaros” when she instructs the boys to take away everything. But that form is only used in Spain. A person in Latin America or the Caribbean would not use that expression. And if they did, then, to remain consistent, their Spanish would have to be like the Spanish in Spain and take all the appropriate forms. Maxine does not do that in other instances.
· The last two imperative verbs here in red were changed to a plural because, in the first part of her command, she’s instructing both boys. But then the text shifts to a singular voice, yet we don’t know who she is addressing with the specific commands of picking up the dishes and hurrying up with the tablecloth.
ACT THREE:
Page 92:
The following words uttered by Shannon should take accent marks:
- San Juan de Letrán
- Juárez
Page 94:
MAXINE [rushing to the path]: Shannon! Shannon! Get back up here, get back up here. Pedro, Pancho, tráiganme a Shannon. ¿Qué está haciendo allí?
· The verb here has been properly placed in its imperative voice and conjugated appropriately. In the original text, it appears as “traerme,” which sounds more like an anglicized version of “bring me” as said by a person learning Spanish. But, based on the dialogue (and not counting the linguistic errors), that does not seem to be the case with Maxine. She shows us in other lines that she is capable of speaking Spanish with the imperative voice, of conjugating it too, and of using proper syntax.
Page 95:
SHANNON: God almighty, I… what did I do? I don’t know what I did. [He turns to the Mexican boys who have come back up the path.] ¿Qué hice? ¿Qué hice?
PANCHO: ¡Te measte en las maletas de las señoras!
· We need a 2nd person indirect object pronoun here, and that’s “te.”
Page 96:
HANNAH: … [to PANCHO] ¡Agárrale las manos!
Page 97:
MAXINE: ¡Muchachos, cójanlo! ¡Átenlo! Está loco. Tráiganlo aquí.
· Corrections to verb tenses conjugations here, in command forms.
Page 103:
MAXINE: Now hear this, you crazy black Irish mick, you! You Protestant black Irish looney, I’ve called up López, Doc López.
· The doctor’s last name takes an accent mark. In the text, some words appear with accent marks, and others don’t. We should put the correct accent marks on all words that require them, for consistency as well as for the appropriate usage.
Page 125:
MAXINE: ¡Shannon se ha escapado!
PEDRO: Mire. Allí está Shannon.
· The verb form “ha escapado” in Spanish requires a reflexive pronoun in this context to accompany it. We would use the 3rd person “se.”
· Improper conjugation of the verb “mirar.” Then, spelling mistakes in the second sentence have been corrected.
