One Heart Breaking

One Heart Breaking "There is a passion for declivity in this world," Tennessee Williams has one of his characters say in Comino Real. The ultimate declivity is death. But the pain that accompanies this descent in Williams' plays is a sense of what is lost during the journey--honor, gentleness, tenderness, brotherhood, the ability to love, or even communicate with, another human being.

In Williams' view, life is an insensate jest in which a man is gradually divested of everything that makes life precious, except the gallantry to go on, the one rock-bottom value that Williams never relinquishes. The disenchantment presupposes an initial enchantment. Williams has always lived and preached the creed of the high romantic. The high romantic pushes his hopes, ideals, joys, pleasures and desires past practical limits, past sensible limits and, finally, perhaps past human limits. Like an eternal child, he wants it all and, when he cannot have it all, his heart breaks.

That is the poignant internal music of Camino Real, the sound of one heart breaking. Unfortunately, the play is too diffuse and episodic to record that sound resonantly. Williams oscillated between writing an ode to the romantic imagination and a bitter philippic against life's raw deal. El Camino Real was once the royal highway from Santa Fe to Chihuahua, Mexico. In the play it becomes a literal dead end, a pothole of a tropical police state where the street cleaners lie in wait to cart away the appointed victims. These include some of the great romantics of history and literature, a sort of aristocracy of personal excesses: Casanova, Lord Byron, Proust's Baron de Charlus, Marguerite Gautier, and Kilroy, an American with a heart "as big as the head of a baby."

Clouds in a Gale. The play is Williams' most ambitious departure from realism; it also makes enormous imaginative demands on the director. In 1953, when Camino Real was first presented, Williams indicated the scope of those demands in his preface: "My desire was to give audiences my own sense of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water in the mountains, or clouds changing shape in a gale, or the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream."

This revival at Manhattan's Lincoln Center comes nowhere near achieving this. Under Director Milton Katselas, the production always hints at emotions that it never arouses, and is never deeply moving in the way that one knows the play could be. Only Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche Du Bois) brings into her Marguerite the authentic Williams tone of defeated gentility, of the violated heart, abusive in self-judgment and terribly tarnished by the world, yet untarnished in spirit.

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