The Night of the Iguana

Saturday night was the first performance in our 2008-09 Triad Stage season pass schedule: Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana. A ramshackle hotel on the Mexican Pacific coast near the jungle in the early 1940s hosts a vertiable gaggle of folks down on their luck: a widowed hotel manager, a defrocked minister, a hopeless painter and her 97-year old poet grandfather. The only characters having a good time here were actually German vacationers celebrating radio reports of the burning of London during the Battle of Britain. Two Mexican "hotel boys" capture an iguana from the jungle, tie it to the hotel, and fatten it up in hopes of slaughter and a good meal. The iguana lurches against the rope, making a grinding, sanding noise. The iguana is at the end of its rope, what is its future? And what of the characters and their respective ropes?

A little long. Chris enjoyed the first act, but not the second. Kimberly was exactly the opposite. And least we both agreed dinner at 1618 West Seafood Grille was delicious beforehand.