Theater Review

The Night of the Iguana

Play by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Michael Wilson. Presented by American Repertory Theater. At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through March 18. Tickets: From $25, 617-547-8300, americanrepertorytheater.org

CAMBRIDGE — “People need human contact,’’ the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon tells Maxine Faulk near the beginning of Tennessee Williams’s 1961 drama “The Night of the Iguana.’’ Especially when divine contact seems so remote. Williams’s last critical success ranges over the playwright’s usual terrain as it searches for love and identity and meaning while pondering the metaphor of the title lizard. But what his plays need most of all, in performance, is actor contact, and “Iguana’’ gets just that in the enjoyable production now up at the American Repertory Theater, where the high-powered cast includes Bill Heck, Dana Delany, Amanda Plummer, Elizabeth Ashley, and James Earl Jones.

There’s actually not a lot the Rev. Shannon doesn’t need. A year after being ordained as an Episcopal minister, he had sex with a young Sunday School teacher and then, from the pulpit, denounced God as a “senile delinquent.’’ Since then, he’s been traveling the world as a guide, once for Cook’s but now with bottom-of-the-barrel Blake Tours.

As the play opens, it’s September 1940, and he’s brought 11 teachers from a Baptist women’s college in Texas to Mexico’s Pacific coast and the rustic Costa Verde hotel run by his old friend Maxine, from whom he’s undoubtedly getting a kickback. But the ladies are revolting, the 16-year-old with whom he’s just had sex is insisting on marriage, and he’s on the verge of another nervous breakdown. Will Shannon find redemption in the arms of recently widowed Maxine, whom he describes as a “bright widow spider’’? Or will it be Nantucket spinster artist Hannah, arriving with her 97-year-old poet grandfather, who saves him? And who will save the iguana, who spends most of the play tied up offstage, waiting to become dinner?

Set designer Derek McLane’s depiction of the Costa Verde veranda is true to the playwright’s vision: hammock, rolling liquor cart, wicker chair, mosquito netting, tub of water to wash sand from feet, strings of lights overhead. A winding stair leads from the front of the stage down to what would be the beach, if you could see it. The hotel itself is a huge wooden structure with narrow slatted cubicle doors. Craggy rocks line the horizon. It’s all as picture perfect as Shannon would like the Texas ladies to believe.

Michael Wilson’s direction is also neat and clean. There are thoughtful touches like the one near the beginning where Shannon, who’s trying to get back on the wagon, takes a few swigs of beer and then pours the rest out. For some reason, however, the crucial sequence where Hannah offers Shannon one of her two remaining cigarettes — the act that establishes her as a lady in his eyes — is cut. And her assertion to him that “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent’’ — the statement that enables Shannon to free the iguana, and then himself — hardly registers in the course of a conversation that’s played to invite laughs.

That’s the overall tone of the production; the desperation of the iguana who’s trying to free itself never spreads to the rest of the cast. Heck’s Shannon seems more like a good-old-boy Texas sheriff than a Virginia gentleman struggling with his faith. Williams’s Maxine is swarthy and stout and a little coarse; Delany’s Maxine is thin and sitcom pert. Plummer’s Hannah starts out more self-absorbed than self-possessed; she improves after intermission, when she lets her hair down but never creates the connection with Shannon that would threaten Maxine. Even Jones, as Nonno, is implausibly alert. The one raw, disruptive performance is Ashley’s as Judith Fellowes, the leader of the Texas ladies. It’s the production’s glimpse of the real Tennessee Williams.

The Night of the Iguana

Play by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Michael Wilson. Presented by American Repertory Theater. At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through March 18. Tickets: From $25, 617-547-8300, www.americanrepertorytheater.org

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.