Theater: ‘Camino Real’ After 17 Years

Williams Play Revived by Lincoln Repertory

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 1970

By Clive Barnes

There are people that think that “Camino Real” was Tennessee Williams best play, and I believe they are right. It is a play that seems to be torn out of a human soul, a tale told by an idiot signifying a great deal of suffering and a great deal of gallantry.

When it was first produced in 1953 there where, many who found it obscure. Our standards of obscurity, like our standards of obscenity, have escalated since those dark days of theatrical innocence. Although here and there “Camino Real” still sounds a little fuddled. A little punch-drunk, the new staging by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company at the Vivian Beaumont seems almost clarity.

Have you noticed that American dramatist tend to give you the story of their lives rather than their view of the world? The American playwright tends to see the theater as a public instrument of autobiography. “Camino Real” is a play that has no story as such, even though it has as many fluttering incidents as an aviary has birds.

The play can perhaps best be seen as symbolic portrait of the American poet- a portrait of a poet on the point of being wrecked and ransacked by circumstances, and clearly Williams has put an almost agonizing amount of himself into the play. Yet it is at times enormously funny as poetically mysterious, and it is illuminated with that special theatricality that Williams has always shown, even in the lower depths of his career. It is a play of genius lavishly misspent, a defiant play about defeat, a play with the shabby smell of death to it.

We are in the dream world of nightmare. The play opens with a Don Quixote, windmills behind him and only the blue haze of the future ahead, who deserted by his Sancho Panza, and like Shakespeare’s Christopher Sly, lays down fitfully dreams a play. Or, as Quixote says: “A masque in which old meanings will be remembered and perhaps new ones discovered.

Quixote dreams of Camino Real, a police state in a hot country, where no one is quite what he was, and from where everyone wants to escape. We are waiting for Kilroy-the mythic all-American hero, the fundamental heart that scrawled a billion graffiti during the journeys of the world.

Kilroy-at last-is here. Oppressed by the police state., the plumply sinister hotel keeper, Gutman, who keeps it, terrified by the street cleaners who specialize in the garbage of dead bodies, Kilroy is made into the national patsy-the buffoon whose nose lights up to entertain the populace.

What can Kilroy do? He sells out. He sells the Golden gloves he won as a champion, but even then he is cheated by love and cheated by sex, terrified by the constant importunities of the street cleaners.

At last Quixote wakes up and shows that although the street cleaners ill one day claim Kilroy and everyone else as garbage, he himself has not lived in vain. He says’ “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” Kilroy’s graffiti-even if perhaps there weren’t as many as he would liked, and his hand did get uncertain after a time-these will survive. As, of course, will “Camino Real.”

Of course the poet is not simply Kilroy, he is also virtually every other character in the play, which is why I called the play a portrait. The characteristics of the poet are fragmented between fragmented between such characters as Byron, Casanova, Proust’s Baron de Charlus and Marguerite Gautier, not to mention Quixote himself, all wandering in the landscape of a dream. It is very poignant and very honest.

The writing itself is often deeply symbolic, for Williams uses symbols like confetti. Here he makes great use of the reiteration of words and idea. Birds and hearts, journeys and streets, even “the road of life” that gives the play it’s name, all conjure up this terrified country of escape and death, where as the playwright points out: “Make voyages! Attempt them! There’s nothing else!” Nothing except sincerity and charity. Here the playwright could perhaps tell that the bank was running low on sincerity, and this that gave him a charity for all of the world’s losers.

Milton Katselas originally stage “Camino Real” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where the scenery and the costumes were also designed by Peter Wexler. It is a most striking production. Mr. Katselas has given a great deal of coherence to this almost casual collage of themes, and Mr. Wexler’s most beautiful setting not only uses the Beaumont Theater better than ever before but provides the visual accompaniment to the fantasy.

There are some good performances in the play, but the level is not as consistently high as in “The Time of Your Life” at the beginning of the season. As Kilroy, Al Pacino does that performance of his again, and as ever does it with great deftness and assurance. He has all of the gustiness of Kilroy but there are shadings of pathos that Mr. Pacino’s alertly mod performance misses.

Jean-Pierre Aumont is slightly out of dramatic focus the washed-up, washed-out Cassanova, but Jessica Tandy is quite marvelous as Camille. She walks in the ashes of a great beauty with all the dignity of an exiled queen.

I admired equally Clifford David as a splendid passionate and tortured Byron, a fine essay in poetic flamboyance, and also Phillip Bosco as he understands and dignified Charlus. There were also well considered performances from Victor Buono as the suavely sinister Guttmann, Patrick McVey as the nobly battered Quixote, Sylvia Syms as the Gypsy, the last of the Latin Jewish mothers.

Yes, I think this is a lovely play, a play of genuinely poetic vision. Since he wrote it Williams has seen good times and bad times, and has yet to write another play. Seen from the brink of the seventies, “Camino Real” now seems oddly prophetic about its author. But the violets did once win.