ABSTRACT
The eponymous animal of Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana is typical in one way: animals tend to be heard rather than seen on the stages of Western theater. By its being trapped in the wings, the captivity and suffering of Williams’s reptile are not only marginalized but rendered obscene-quite literally so, if we accept the contested etymology of the word, from the Greek ob-skene: off-stage (McKay). This obscuring and “obscening” of the animal is the hallmark of the dominant tradition of Western theater, a tradition that is obsessively anthropocentric, dedicated to repeatedly constructing and enshrining the human as “the paragon of animals” (Hamlet 2.2.297) by derogating or excluding all others.
