Hamilton and castmates shine in lively `Night'

STOCKBRIDGE -- Solid and thoroughly considered, Anders Cato's production of ``The Night of the Iguana" at Berkshire Theatre Festival gives us a grounded, coherent version of the 1961 play that was to prove Tennessee Williams's last big success. At times, it's even a little too grounded in reality for a Williams play, but it's nevertheless worth seeing for the uniformly high level of the performances.

Linda Hamilton, who has few stage credits to match her film credentials from the ``Terminator" series, delivers a particularly strong, fully realized characterization of Maxine Faulk, the earthy widow who runs the ramshackle seaside hotel in 1940 Mexico where ``Iguana" takes place. From the opening moment, when we see Maxine through the screen of a cabana, astride one of her lusty young workers, Hamilton grabs this role hard and sucks down every rum-soaked drop of its juice. She gives us both Maxine's strength and her despair, her pragmatism and her dreams, her bawdy embrace of life and her clutching fear of death.

When Garret Dillahunt walks up the jungle path as the seedy, defrocked minister who's leading an unhappy band of church-lady tourists, the first impression is that he's too young, too undamaged, to play such a broken-down man as the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon. We need to believe as desperately as Shannon does that he has nowhere to go but here when the ladies get him kicked off their tour, but this handsome rake still looks as if he could find his way back to Acapulco.

Looks aren't everything, though, and gradually Dillahunt builds a believable portrait of a tortured man on the brink. He's helped by Amelia Campbell's quivery portrayal of Hannah Jelkes, the fading spinster artist whose travels with her grandfather, a dying Yankee poet, bring her to the hotel. Campbell relies a bit too much on a saintly, shut-eyed smile, but in her long, delicately balanced scenes with Shannon, she infuses Hannah with the kind of unearthly light that Williams requires.

Unfortunately, the actual light, especially at the front of the stage, is jarringly bright and harsh, though the rear parts of Carl Sprague's effectively abstracted set are more appropriately gloomy. The glare only deepens the sense of being too much in this world for Williams; when the play tries to soar onto a higher spiritual plane, we see mundane reality too clearly to follow along. Scott Killian's spooky music helps, but not quite enough.

Cato does a fine job of bringing out the humor in many of Williams's lines, though sometimes the balance tips too far toward comedy. You can't blame him for having fun with the gaggle of white-gloved, straw-hatted church ladies who sing and stomp in the background. But sometimes the laughter undercuts the essential melancholy of the piece.

And when a play's central metaphor is an iguana, trapped and waiting for slaughter, it's important to keep the audience from laughing so much that everything -- especially that big lizard -- starts to seem only funny. It is funny, of course, but it has to be the kind of funny that makes you cry.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.