Camino Real

Tennessee Williams is best known and loved for his plays steeped in realism, seething with sexual overtones like A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Rose Tattoo. The Hartford Stage is presenting on a multi-level set, a ferocious, feverish party, a swirling crimson-drenched Camino Real, which, although rooted in historical allusion, is far more phantasmagorical and abstract than any of Williams' other seventy plays. It was not well-received when it opened on Broadway in 1953.

Reflecting Williams's intention that this work be more painted than written, the play is an amazingly contemporary collage of creative spirit, poetic language, and wide-ranging ideas, offering a challenge that director Michael Wilson (artistic director of the Hartford Stage) and his brilliantly energetic cast meet with an intense esprit de corps. By incorporating the “Ten Blocks of Camino Real,” written by Williams in 1948, into the prologue and adding interesting original music composed by John Gromada, this dramatic hell possesses an operatic air. If, at moments, particularly at the outset, there is confusion, things do become clearer as the play progresses. “Camino Real,” translated from the Spanish, means "Royal Highway." It originally covered 1800 miles between Loreto, Baja California to Sonoma.

The play is set in a kind of neverland that is described by the playwright as the square of a walled town which is the end and the beginning of Camino Real. There, costumed by David C. Woolard, gypsies, soldiers, and a number of imprisoned, disparate, romantic characters—some famous, some infamous -- intersect, almost all trying to escape a cruel existence. (The playwright indicated the use of an anglicized pronunciation to emphasize their fall from royalty into a bizarre, hellish reality.)

The ever-reliable Helmar Augustus Cooper, looking sumptuous in white tuxedo, is Gutman, the narrator and proprietor of an elegant hotel. Among its most renowned residents is Casanova, played with verve and depth by Rip Torn, whose accent, however, wavers between Southern Italy and the deep South of America. Casanova, described as an eighteenth century Italian adventurer, violinist, spy, alchemist, librarian, gambler, seminarian, author, preacher and lover (not necessarily in that order) is living there while waiting for a check, by the generosity of the beautiful but dissipated courtesan, Marguerite Gautier, known to all as Camille.

The word that comes to mind when describing Betty Buckley in this role is soignee. Translated from the French, it means: elegant, sophisticated, polished. Buckley sweeps onto the stage with her consummate experience and distinctively throaty voice, and you wish she could send everyone else home and just sing. However, she is joined by raft of others trying to find their way out. There's James Colby, last seen as Stanley in Hartford's A Streetcar Named Desire; he's Kilroy, of "Kilroy was There" fame, effective as a pugilist with a heart condition, who is forced to wear a clown costume.

There's John Feltch, who gives three piercing portrayals: Baron de Charlus, Lord Byron, and Don Quixote. Lord and Lady Mulligan, Nafe Katter and Natalie Brown, are classy. Although life and death matters pervade the plot, the last scene of the first act, in which all the characters try to escape by boarding Fugitivo Airlines is painfully amusing. It is both a tribute to Tennessee Williams and a mark against air travel that this could have been written today.

Note: Betty Buckley didn't appear for several performances; Lisa Leguillou, who plays Esmerelda, took her place in this fascinating but imperfect play.