{"id":2612,"date":"2017-02-27T02:58:24","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T10:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=2612"},"modified":"2017-02-27T02:58:24","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T10:58:24","slug":"night-of-the-iguana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2017\/02\/27\/night-of-the-iguana\/","title":{"rendered":"Night of the Iguana"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was at the American Repertory Theater <\/em>in Cambridge last week.\u00a0 When my female companion and I went downstairs for a pre-show pee, we saw two bathrooms with no signage.\u00a0 As we tried to figure it out, one snooty broad sporting a 5 o’clock shadow said, “This is Cambridge – we don’t believe in labels!”\u00a0 Why was I there?\u00a0 Because there are a handful of people I would fly anywhere in the world to see.\u00a0 One of those people is Elizabeth Ashley<\/strong>.\u00a0 It almost doesn’t matter what the play is, what the role is, what the theatre is, or if anyone else is in the audience.\u00a0 Because, frankly, when you are faced with Elizabeth Ashley, nobody else exists.\u00a0 And when the play is by Tennessee Williams<\/strong>, it’s hand-in-glove time.\u00a0 When the ART <\/em>announced it would mount Williams’ Night of the Iguana<\/em><\/strong>, I was intrigued.\u00a0 When it cast Bill Heck<\/strong>, Dana Delany<\/strong>, Amanda Plummer<\/strong>, James Earl Jones<\/strong>, and Elizabeth Ashley, I booked my flight.<\/p>\n

What Williams does brilliantly is bring disparate, desperate people together in a claustrophobic-yet-airy environment.\u00a0 Then he turns on the heat and lets them sizzle.\u00a0 Director Michael Wilson <\/strong>makes two things perfectly clear – he trusts the text, and he trusts his actors.\u00a0 It’s an evocative but uncluttered production with direction which underscores the dialogue but never glosses over it.\u00a0 Some of the performances are better than others, but there’s nary a clunker in the bunch.\u00a0 Still, it’s Ashley who wakes things up.\u00a0 She enters like a Texas tornado and raises the stakes considerably.\u00a0 Whenever you’re bored, watch her eat dinner in the background – you can almost taste the iguana!\u00a0 The play runs through Marcy 18th, so grab one of the remaining tickets at AmericanRepertoryTheater.org<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge last week.\u00a0 When my female companion and I went downstairs for a pre-show pee, we saw two bathrooms with no signage.\u00a0 As we tried to figure it out, one snooty broad sporting a 5 o’clock shadow said, “This is Cambridge – we don’t believe in labels!”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2613,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2612\/revisions\/2613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}