Dramaturgy

Curated by Amy Stoller

The Play and its History

Williams, Tennessee. The Night of The Iguana (One-Act Version). Ebook. The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Issue 4—2001. Introduction by Brian Parker.

Williams, Tennessee. The Night of The Iguana (Working Version). Esquire, February 1, 1962.

Williams, Tennessee. The Night of the Iguana. New York: New Directions Pub, 2009. Print.
This edition includes the authorized production script, as first published by New Directions in 1962 following the play’s original Broadway opening, and also Williams’s 1948 short story, “The Night of the Iguana,” plus his invaluable 1961 essay, “A Summer of Discovery.”

Parker, Brian. “A Provisional Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Night of the Iguana’ (1961).” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 98, no. 1 (2004): 54–89.

Interview with the Playwright

Terkel, Studs. “Tennessee Williams talks with Studs Terkel.” Broadcast December 1961.

Commentary on the Play

Cabello, Juanita. “A Summer of Discovery, The Exilic and Touristic Poetics of The Night of the Iguana.”The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Issue 12—2011.

Trigos, Mercedes. “A Space Open to Sexuality: The Verandah in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana.”Colloquium, Issue 5, November 5, 2014.

Wang, Xuding. “Taoism and Maxine Faulk.”The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture. Vol 10.1. December 2016

Commentary on the Playwright

Kaplan, David. “Tennessee Williams and Yukio Mishima” Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival 2019 Catalog: 10–14.

Kolin, Philip C. “Compañero Tenn, The Hispanic Presence in the Plays of Tennessee Williams.”The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Issue 2—1999.

Music

Williams specifies two German songs to be used in The Night of the Iguana. One, to be used once, is the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” The other, which is called for several times in the stage directions, is titled “Matrosenlied” (“Sailor Song”), but was often referred to in the Nazi era as “Engellandlied” or “Wir fahren gegen Engeland” (“We’re going against England”). Williams just calls it “a Nazi marching song,” and provides Hermann Löns’s original German lyrics with a serviceable English translation at the end of the script.

Information on the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” can be found at the Jewish Virtual Library and NationalAnthems.info.

Information on “Matrosenlied” can be found (in poorly edited English) at Children in History and (in German) on pp. 18–19 of the Hermann Löns Blätter of March 2012.

Williams also calls for a marimba band playing “Palabras de Mujer” (“Women’s Words”), a bolero by famed Mexican songwriter Agustín Lara. This song post-dates the setting of the play by several years, but Williams seems to have been particularly fond of Lara’s music. He may have chosen it for its atmospheric, rather than its chronological value.

Other

Bergeret, Roger & Quintero, Alejandro & Escalante, Mónica. “Complexity of Acapulco Evolution as a Tourist Destination.”  Journal of Intercultural Management. 9. 10.1515/joim-2017-0011.

Ortiz Garza, José Luis. “Propaganda warfare in Mexican Radio during Second World War.”

Salvucci, Richard. “The Economic History of Mexico.”EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. December 27, 2018.