The Gamm Presents The Night of the Iguana in Their New Home

The Gamm will open their 2018-2019 season with The Night of the Iguana on October 11. Fred Sullivan, a longtime member of Trinity Repertory Company, is directing the classic play by Tennessee Williams at The Gamm’s new home: the former Ocean State Theater Company building in Warwick.

Tony Estrella stars as the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, defrocked for blasphemy and fornication and at the end of his rope. Working as a cut-rate tour guide in Mexico, he arrives at a ramshackle hotel, owned by his recently widowed friend, with a group of mutinous Baptist ladies in tow. Will the alcoholic Shannon come to terms with his failures among the misfit guests? Or will he spiral out of control?

The cast also features Sam Babbitt, Tom Gleadow, Daraja Hinds, Brandon Whitehead, Jeanine Kane and Michelle Walker.

Sullivan previously directed productions of some of Williams’ other works, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie. “I had the great fortune of working with (Babbitt), (Kane) and Tony as the leads in Cat, the first play produced under Tony as artistic director and the last production we put on in Providence,” Sullivan said.

“The Night of the Iguana started as a 1946 Williams short story in which a spinster and an older gay writer become close during a stay at a ramshackle Mexican hotel,” Sullivan explained.  “Her predicament is mirrored by a captured iguana, and their relationship severs the ‘strangling rope of her loneliness.’”

Sullivan believes the themes in Williams’ play are every bit as relevant today as they were more than 70 years ago. “I feel profoundly fortunate to be working on his complicated forms and complex characters during this time of extreme division, venal untruths and so much indefensible heartless ignorance,” Sullivan added.

The Night of the Iguana runs Oct. 11-Nov. 4 at The Gamm Theatre, 1245 Jefferson Blvd., Warwick. gammtheatre.org; 401-723-4266