The Penobscot Theatre Company has not been kind to Tennessee Williams.

Most often it has been a poorly cast lead from New York or Boston who has arrived with a preconceived vision for both his character and the show that nobody else shared or understood, least of all the audience.

It happened in 1996 with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and again in 1998 with “A Streetcar Named Desire” under the direction of Lisa A. Tromovitch.

Scott R.C. Levy has made a similar mistake with “The Night of the Iguana,” which opened Friday at the Bangor Opera House. The remarkable set and lighting designs, the outstanding performances of most cast members and a magical onstage rainstorm nearly make up for Kent Burnham’s off-the-mark performance as the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal priest.

The play, first performed in 1961, is set in the run-down Costa Verde Hotel in 1940 in Puerto Barrio on Mexico’s West Coast. Shannon stops there while leading a tour bus full of Texas schoolgirls and their chaperone. In the midst of an emotional and spiritual crisis, he finds, as the playwright did, respite and renewal in the tropical climate amid similar sojourners.

“Night of the Iguana” is considered by Williams scholar Foster Hirsch to be one of the playwright’s most affirmative plays that dramatizes his belief in the transforming and healing powers of art and confession. Amy Tischler described Williams, like Shannon, as a “man of God on a prolonged sabbatical.”

Shannon also is a charming reprobate. Women long to save him from himself. What he is most successful at is seduction and his crisis is not necessarily that he no longer believes in God but that all his efforts to seduce him have fallen short. He’s also an alcoholic, who, like Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” drinks until he hears that click in his head that shuts out all the pain.

Burnham’s Shannon is a man in the grip of a manic episode. Either that, or he has a bad migraine coming on and a nasty case of fleas. The decision to play the man with so many physical ticks – nearly collapsing when the bus horn is honked and scratching behind his ear like some mangy street dog – takes the focus off the character’s spiritual crisis.

The actor’s rapid-fire delivery also runs roughshod over Williams’ lyrical language. Burnham showed none of the magnetism that makes women from teenagers to middle-aged widows and old maids fall naked at his feet. There was no glimpse, however fleeting, at the minister who inspired his flock on Sunday mornings. Whoever Burnham’s Shannon is, he’s not the charming and haunted man Williams’ created.

Tracy Liz Miller as Hannah and AJ Mooney as Maxine, the women who orbit Shannon and vie to save him, are outstanding despite the little Burnham gives them to play opposite. Miller’s Hannah is a reservoir of cool, calm waters. Like Maxine, Hannah knows herself and is comfortable with who she has chosen to be.

Miller gives the New England spinster the spirituality that Shannon longs for but has failed to see, let alone grasp. The actress brings a grace and depth to the character without turning her into a saint or a woman who has chosen to be in the world but not of it. The fact that Hannah’s feet are planted firmly on the ground is a credit to the actress’s understanding of the breadth Williams gave the character.

Again and again, however, it is Mooney who infuses the production with the passion for living and loving that the playwright found while in exile in Mexico. Of all the actors who have performed in PTC productions of Williams’ plays, she is one of the few who has communed with the man’s soul.

Maxine embodies the lusty life force Williams’ and most other human beings try so hard to harness. Mooney creates a woman who doesn’t try to break or saddle it like a horse but rides it bareback. Maxine is probably the most honest and healthy of Williams’ women, and in Mooney’s hands, she also is one of the few to not simply embrace her sexuality, but to embody it.

A group of fine supporting performers, made up of local actors and University of Maine students, nicely rounds out the cast. Joye Cook-Levy as Miss Judith Fellowes is especially good as the tour chaperone protecting her charges. Everything the audience needs to know about the character the actress says in her purposeful stride.

The shining star of the show is Lex Liang’s set with tropical foliage that extends across the proscenium and the front of the stage. The Costa Verde is so delightfully seedy theatergoers may want to check their clothes for bugs at intermission but it’s the rainstorm at the end of the second act that season ticket holders will long fondly remember.

Until his misstep with “Night of the Iguana,” Levy had an almost perfect season with “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Peter Pan” and “Little Shop of Horrors” being high-water marks not just for his tenure but in the company’s long history. As producing artistic director, Levy’s vision for what the Bangor Opera House can be to and for the community is vividly being brought to life with the nearly completed restoration of the exterior and the planned renovations to the interior.

What “The Night of the Iguana” needs most is more Levy, less Burnham.

jharrison@bangordailynews.net

990-8207

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “The Night of the Iguana” by Tennessee Williams

WHERE: Bangor Opera House, 131 Main St.

WHEN: May 15-18

CONTACT: 942-3333 or

877-PTC-TIXX; www.penobscottheatre.org