Everyone has their favorite Tennessee Williams play. The Night of the Iguana is not one of mine. I would classify it as one of my favorite Williams’ novels. It has interesting characters, a sexually-charged theme, and a sticky plot, but it takes its sweet time getting to its foregone conclusion even more than any of Williams’ other amazing plays. The tragedy of Williams plays tends to be the inability of characters to make the right choices for themselves, denying reality, repeating history, and rushing headlong into self-defeat. It’s the rare character indeed who gets out alive from any of his works. So it is with Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon and his two gals/choices, potential saving grace Hannah Jelkes and temptress Maxine Faulk. Neither is a particularly good choice, though Hannah’s questionable brand of bait-and-switch redemption does seem safer than Maxine’s hedonism. The battle for the disgraced Reverend is what drives this bleakly novelistic play. Nearly Naked Theatre dusts off a classic and treads a less volatile path with this pick, mounting a production that features two excellent performances, a strong ensemble, and a bit of a disappointment at its center.

Congratulations go to director David Weiss for most of his casting, his careful pacing, and his lovely set design. He has cast actresses who capture Williams’ polar opposites of femininity precisely with Patti Davis Suarez as a slinky feline Maxine and Andrea Dovner as a rigid, yearning Hannah. It’s not easy to keep this play moving at the speed of a madman in a tropical paradise owing to its great bursts of energy balanced by its more tranquil moments, but Weiss accomplishes this and keeps the audience conscious through most of its two-and-a-half hours. His realistic and visionary mix of a set is full of great details and clever surprises, from breeze-blown palms to squares of light allowing the audience to peek into the rooms. When combined with Wolfram Ott’s expressive lighting design that captures storms and the rise and fall of clouds in the night, there are a lot of elements of this show to enjoy.

But there’s an emotional letdown larger than the ending of this show. As strong as Suarez and Dovner are, Joseph Kremer’s decaying Reverend Shannon is lacking in emotional choices. Shannon’s blustering, already prone to histrionics, affords Kremer only two modes of presentation: proselytizing and subtexting. His long harangues on God, nature, and women begin to run together, presented as rants often from the bully pulpit of Maxine’s patio bar. When working through a mental collapse with Dovner’s Hannah, probably the best scene in the piece, he consistently plays into the subtext and flirtatiousness, rarely working against the words or meanings to provide shading to a lengthy but crucial conversation.

Marty Berger is a grand counterpoint as the aging poetic huckster, a glimpse into Shannon’s potential future, as he cultivates the grandness of the old Jonathan Coffin, and does an excellent job of allowing us to see his smooth exterior fall away to expose the truth within. In their dual roles as German couples and the members of Shannon’s ill-fated tour, Teresa Ybarra, Courtney Weir, and John Schile do an excellent job of presenting their mixed charges. Ybarra is particularly effective as the uptight and self-righteous Miss Fellowes.

As strong as Weiss’ lighting and Ott’s lighting, Jerica Nelson’s costumes and Bob Nelson’s sound design mix together a lyrical blending to create this rundown Mexican oasis.