Set designer Harry Feiner's haunting evocation of a decaying town is the first thing we see as we enter the Shakespeare Festival's new Kirby Theater. As the houselights dim, it is the task of composer Nicholas Kitsopoulos to arrest our auditory nerves with beguiling, Latin American-influenced music that suggests both the imperceptible dangers and the impenetrable desires that propel the strange and elusive world of Tennessee Williams's most baffling and controversial play, Camino Real. Here also lighting designer Steven Rosen bathes this unspecified desert or tropical location south of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in atmospherics so intoxicating as to block out any sense of the world as we know it.
If the sense of being in another world doesn't grab you from the outset in Bonnie J. Monte's stunning staging of Williams's rarely-produced 1953 play, you can expect the arrival of none other than Don Quixote de la Mancha and his disillusioned lackey, Sancho Panza, to do the job. Our eyes follow them as they wearily make their way down the aisle and into a corrupt, hostile, and brutal place where the only hope for survival is an eternal search.
Deserted by his heretofore faithful companion, Quixote falls asleep. And he dreams. Camino Real is his dream -- a disturbing pageant wherein despair and desire, decadence and romance, are jumbled up with the playwright's own look into the darkly-illuminated mirror of his own soul.
Camino Real has no more plot than a visit to the mall, no more order than the first break in a game of billiards, and it jumps from reality to dreams to memories like a visit to a psychoanalyst. Yet in its labyrinthine structure, there are treasures to be gleaned, not the least of which is the incomparable satiric wit of an extraordinarily daring playwright. The wit comes in the existential musings and fantastical reveries of poets and personified figments of the imagination that ruefully attempt to transcend the ordinary and the heartless.
Be aware that Casanova, Camille, and Lord Byron are among the more curious characters of Camino Real. The work's satire comes with the arrival of the doomed young prizefighter, Kilroy, an ordinary American whose only defense is bravado and childlike innocence. He and a comically earthy gypsy woman, and her daughter (who becomes a virgin with every full moon), seek and secure their destiny without regret.
It is no accident that in Monte's almost three-hour production, which boasts a cast of 34 (many playing multiple roles), we can feel the passion and pleasure that drives her direction. Monte's long-time dream to explore Williams's apocalyptic allegory is realized. She has found an almost perfect cast and achieved the ideal tone and pace for this multi-leveled play. Williams's lust for both sacred and profane love was always tempered with devilish humor and never with more relish than in Camino Real.
The eminently accessible text (described as inscrutable and problematic by some), is quite simply his vision of destiny as seen through the experience of ravaged victims seeking escape from a police state. Monte's direction honors both the playwright's audacious spirit and the anguish of the rueful characters he so rapturously conceived. Although the action that takes place along the 16 blocks of the Camino Real is bleak and horrific, all of it callously and matter-of-factly observed by a overseer, narrator, and landlord named Gutman (Tom Brennan), Williams's penchant for naughty humor and his inimitable eloquence consistently shine through. You could say it is a vision of hell with a sense of humor.
This production looks richer and more fully conceptualized than any play yet produced in the Shakespeare Festival's new theater. The only staging I had seen previously was the 1970 Lincoln Center revival that starred Jessica Tandy, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Al Pacino, as Kilroy. And I did not go to the Williamstown Festival production last month (with Ethan Hawke as Kilroy), one of a sudden rash of four regional productions taking place within a 12-month stretch, but somehow I am glad to have rediscovered this masterpiece through Monte's eyes.
Paul Molnar will break your heart as Kilroy. Unlike the other characters held prisoner by their emotions, the rebellious Kilroy is forced to make the humiliating transformation from champ to patsy. Molnar never loses touch with Kilroy's brash, self-deceiving optimism, even as he is hounded and mistreated by the police, emotionally and physically crippled by a failing heart as big a baby's head, and unable to compromise his love for his wife for a one-night stand with a gypsy girl.
I was so moved and impressed by many individual performances in this current production that a return visit for me is mandatory. If Don Quixote is destined to sleep through the bulk of the play, his portrayer, Edmond Genest, reappears briefly and poignantly as the sweetly depraved Baron de Charles. Mark Elliot Wilson touchingly reflects the self-deception of the dissipated old roue, Casanova. Although I question the too-freshly-beautiful appearance of Pamela J. Gray as the courtesan Marguerite (TK), her otherwise graceful performance is not without a pathetic resonance. Anne MacMillan proves riotously raucous as the mercenary gypsy who makes her outrageous prognostications over a microphone in the public square. Opal Alladin is perkily insinuating as the gypsy's veiled and newly-virginal daughter, Esmeralda. And there isn't a moment in Malcolm Tulip's turn as Lord Byron where you won't feel the touch of the poet.
Monte's direction of the seething cast that include street people, carnival celebrants, mummers, passengers, pickpockets, vendors, and uniformed guards, provides a brilliantly surreal frame for the netherworld of Camino Real. To Monte's credit, the play's abstract nature is never compromised, but neither is the purity of each character's reality. Nothing that appears on any New Jersey stage this summer should command your attention before this Camino Real.
