New Play in Manhattan

Camino Real is Playwright Tennessee Williams' most agitated protest and least effective play. In it Williams is in flight, more than ever before, from theatrical realism. At the same time, he is appalled as never before by reality itself. Using the gaudiest of theater tricks--florid language, Hellzapoppin explosions, surrealist juxtapositions--he has shattered the familiar outer shell of life to reveal decadence and rottenness within. But in doing so, he has partly succumbed as a writer to what as a moralist he would expose.

Though time & place are deliberately not specified in Camino Real, they seem modern and Mexican. The scene is a fortresslike, claustrophobic public square featuring such darkly symbolic places as a luxury hotel, a flophouse, a brothel, a pawnshop, and such darkly symbolic figures as a callous worldling who spits on common humanity, Storm-Trooperish policemen who cudgel it, street cleaners who cart its bodies off to the city dump. Around an arriving young American prizefighter with a bad heart flow loan sharks, plutocrats, cooch dancers, madams, homosexuals, a Casanova on his uppers, a Camille who herself must buy love, a Lord Byron who escapes to Greece for an ideal, a Don Quixote who offers the escape of illusions.

Williams has created a phantasmagoria of brutality, treachery, corruption, has doused it with sex, punctuated it with farce, dyed it in melodrama. Doubtless the play is at times revolting because it sets out to convey the author's own revulsion; and Camino Real is perhaps excessively pessimistic in reaction against Williams' previous Rose Tattoo, with its factitious "affirmation." But very excessive it is--and not only excessively black, but excessively purple. Camino Real lacks philosophic or dramatic progression (on that score, it might claim the dead-endness of a wasteland), but it also lacks all discipline and measure, so that the wasteland becomes a swamp.

What makes the play ultimately unacceptable is not that it is often dull and even more often arty, but that it exposes decadence with decadent means. Lush and sensational, it uses its material as theatrical hootch; it spells out every sentence and then adds exclamation points. Causes are forgotten in the passion for effects; a vision of Hell dwindles into a Grand Guignol. Elia Kazan has directed the play vividly as a theater piece; he doubtless could not help adding glare to what cries out for shade.

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