Leads deliver heat in "The Night of the Iguana"

Hannah Jelkes is neat as a pin, cool and composed even in suffocating tropical heat. The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon is a feverish and sweat-soaked wreck, a human hurricane at war with God, womankind and (especially) himself.

As they share a witching night on a sweltering Mexican patio, in Tennessee Williams' 1961 play "The Night of the Iguana," the two are yin-yang opposites designed for maximum dramatic effect. But they are also fellow renegades in a jam. And, perhaps, different aspects of their famous author's famously splintered psyche.

However you analyze them, without the right Hannah and Shannon, "Night of the Iguana" wilts and shrivels.

Happily, there's no chance of that happening in the new production of "Night of the Iguana" at ACT Theatre, mounted insightfully and incisively by Jon Jory. John Procaccino and Suzanne Bouchard aren't merely convincing as Shannon, a washed-up former minister, and Hannah, a genteel but steely sketch artist. As the night in question unfolds, these esteemed Seattle actors actually seem to sizzle and burn through their roles, as if passing through a refiners' fire.

Set on the grubby veranda of a hilltop hotel that's clearly seen better days, "Night of the Iguana" is Williams' most spiritually questing play — and, oddly enough, one of his most entertaining.

It begins with a bang, with Shannon's arrival at the hotel run by his just-widowed old pal Maxine (Patricia Hodges). The guy is a wreck — broke, sick, suicidal and about to be canned for sleeping with an underage teenager attached to his Baptist tour group.

Nearly as desperate, but far more calm about it, is Hannah, who reaches the hotel with her frail, 97-year-old grandpa, Nonno (Clayton Corzatte), in tow. This odd and footloose duo, who earn their way hawking sketches and reciting poems, are also busted. And they also rely on Maxine for shelter as a tropical storm gathers.

It's an obvious setup for a standard love triangle, with Shannon caught between the intriguingly virginal Hannah, and the lusty, jealous Maxine. But Williams punctures his romantic balloons again and again in "Iguana." What is most at stake for Shannon is not whom he beds, but his very will to endure — and to recover the remnants of faith in a God he disparages as a cruel and "senile delinquent."

Hannah also reaches a turning and breaking point. The only person she has loved, her "minor poet" grandfather, is disintegrating before her eyes — and, valiantly, trying to finish his own humble life's work.

The gradual intimacy that develops between Shannon, who gets so crazy he is tied down on a hammock, and Hannah, who nurses him in body and spirit while facing her own terrors, is the play's real meat.

And what nuance and understanding Procaccino and Bouchard bring to this unlikely relationship, between a sinning seeker and a complicated saint. Shannon's wit, misery and yearning seem to ooze out of Procaccino's pores, and his scorching sarcasm (he calls Hannah "a fantastic cool hustler") crackles. Bouchard gives us Hannah-the-healer, but also that shrewd hustler. And with such gestures as a facial caress and its recoiling response, a few strategically loaded silences and many wry and penetrating gazes, the actors get beyond Williams' occasionally florid stretches of dialogue and obvious symbolism, to the play's redemptive marrow.

If only another relationship had been so well-mined: Shannon's with Maxine. Hodges gives the latter the look and toughness of a ravaged survivor, and wisely avoids overplaying the hot-mama card. But we don't get the force of Maxine's sensual earthiness here, nor Shannon's begrudging attraction to it.

Even so, ACT's "Night of the Iguana" already whips up quite a summer storm. And it profits from a superb turn by Corzatte, solid supporting work by actors Eddie Levi Lee and Laura Kenny, and a gloriously ratty setting by Paul Owen, complemented by Michael Wellborn's high-humidity lighting and Marcia Dixcy Jory's costumes.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com