ACT's Iguana suffers from cold-blooded lead

The Night of the Iguana should be an actor's dream: a drama filled with sex, religion, madness and Mexico. Unfortunately, actor John Procaccino's shallow portrayal of the main character cripples ACT's production which would have otherwise brought down the house.

The play, which won Tennessee Williams a New York Drama Critic's award in 1962, follows the breakdown of the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in a dilapidated hotel on the western coast of Mexico. Kicked out of his Virginia parish for "fornication and heresy," Shannon (Procaccino) is now a tour guide hauling a busload of vacationing choir women through the rainforest. When the play begins, he's already seduced an underage girl in the tour group and begun his search for God again. He stops at the hotel to collect his thoughts and speak to the owner, his old friend Maxine (Patricia Hodges).

Maxine, who just lost her husband, offers Shannon plenty of sexual attention. But Shannon is more captivated by Hannah (Suzanne Bouchard), a guest traveling with her ailing grandfather. As Shannon becomes increasingly neurotic and insists on keeping the restless tour group at the hotel, Hannah calms him and gets him to open up about his past.

At its heart, the play is about three people -- Hannah, Shannon and Maxine -- lost in the jungle of life. Bouchard plays Hannah perfectly, lending her character soul, intelligence and keen powers of observation that fit her profession as a portrait artist. She is composed and dignified, a refreshing counterbalance to Procaccino's frenetic sputtering.

But Procaccino doesn't imbue Shannon with wit or humanity, and fails to answer pivotal questions like why he came to Maxine's run-down hotel in the first place. When he looks out at the audience, his character's haunted past and desire for redemption don't burn through his eyes. Rather, he plays a simpleton spitting out words with the eloquence of President George W. Bush, and is similarly uncomfortable with silence and complexity -- a far cry from what the script demands and Williams intended.

Procaccino is one of Seattle's most celebrated actors; among other roles at ACT, he's played Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and Reverend Parris in The Crucible. Yet his technique in this play is flawed. When he speaks, he speaks because it is his cue to talk, not because his character needs to say something. He doesn't listen well to the other characters and react to them in the moment. It's as if he's afraid to let the words inhabit his chest and his gut. He instead spouts them out loudly, mistaking fervor for honesty and cynicism for wit.

It's too bad the play couldn't work without its lead, because the other actors perform well. Though Hodges, like Procaccino, has a little trouble interacting spontaneously with her fellow actors, Laura Kenney is hilarious as Judith Fellowes, the choir mistress, and Clayton Corzatte gives a touching performance as Hannah's grandfather, a poet struggling to finish his last poem. Even UW Professional Actors Training Program student Connell Brown, Jr. heartily upstages Procaccino in his turn as the bus driver Hank. The set, a vivid concoction of orange tile and green foliage, pleases the eye, and director Jon Jory (a professor in the UW drama department) stages each scene cleanly. But none of it can overcome the damage done by Procaccino, whose performance lacks the heart to make Shannon anything more than a psychotic pedophile.

Before Iguana opened, Procaccino told the Seattle Times he was finally ready to do this role justice after botching his first attempt in 1995.

Perhaps, for Procaccino, the third time's the charm.