Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel near Acapulco, in Mexico. The hotelkeeper, the Widow Maxine Faulk, played by Bette Davis, is a hostage to devil-in-the-flesh sensuality. T. Lawrence Shannon (Patrick O'Neal), a defrocked clergyman turned tourist guide, is spooked by guilt. As a man who was barred from his church for committing "fornication and heresy in the same week," O'Neal seems agonizingly nailed to a cross of nerves. Nonno (Alan Webb), a 97-year-old poet, is the prisoner of art and age, struggling between memory lapses to finish a new poem. Hannah Jelkes (Margaret Leighton), Nonno's spinster granddaughter, has invested her emotional life in selfless care of the old man. Leighton's acting has the purity of light.

There are some Williams-patented shockers in Iguana, but they are muted in the air of near-Oriental serenity that envelops the play. There is a speech of Widow Faulk's in which she tells of overhearing Shannon's account of how his mother caught him practicing "the little boy's vice" and spanked him with a hairbrush for angering "both God and Mama." Shannon's explanation of his adult behavior is that he "got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls.'' Then there is what Williams calls "the dunghill speech," a not-for-the-squeamish passage in which Shannon relates to Hannah how he once saw the natives of an unnamed country scavenge a dung heap for undigested food. In the internal logic of the play, the speech is fully justified, for Shannon is testing Hannah and her previously stated creed that "nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind."

Iguana has the hue of hope. At the end, Shannon stays with the Widow Faulk to help make a go of the hotel. Nonno completes his poem. Though he dies and Hannah must go on alone, she has been given the strength to do it. Yet it is the anguished daily testing of existence itself that Hannah seems fearful of as she utters the last lines of the play. Lifting her eyes toward the heavens, she pleads, "Oh God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please let us! It's so quiet here now!"

"I Don't Like Myself." It is a plea from a driven, riven man—although outwardly Williams does not seem that way. He has ready good humor and an explosive laugh. His drawl is as smooth as the good bourbon with which it is usually enriched. He stands 5 ft. 6 in., weighs 155 lbs., and like most Americans worries about his weight. He is darkly good-looking, and might in another era have passed for a Mississippi riverboat gambler.

Williams retains tension the way some people retain fluids. To ease the strain of meeting people and facing the world, he relies partly on cigarettes (two packs a day), but mostly on drink and pills. A trifle defensively, Williams puts his intake of liquor at half of a fifth a day. "It's more like half a fifth of bourbon and half a fifth of vodka," says a friend. Williams at times takes half a Dexamyl to "pep up," 1½ Seconals a day "to smooth things over," and two Miltowns with Scotch to go to sleep.

Williams is a gentle man who seethes with inner violence and something akin to self-hatred. "I was brought up puritanically," he explains. "I try to outrage that Puritanism. I have an