Afterlife

Reviving Tennessee Williams

by Steve Vineberg

CAMINO REAL By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set designed by James Noone. Costumes by Michael Krass. Lighting by Kevin Adams. With Ethan Hawke, Blair Brown, Richard Easton, Jeffrey Jones, Hope Davis, Kristine Nielsen, Christian Camargo, and John Seidman. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 4.

Camino Real, which opens the mainstage season at Williamstown this summer, is one of Tennessee Williams's wackiest and most uncategorizably enchanting works. Written in 1953, it's a dream play set in an afterlife peopled by literary icons and characters from literature and popular culture -- Jacques Casanova, Marguerite Gautier (the heroine of Dumas fils's Camille), Lord Byron, Proust's Baron de Charlus, and others. Trapped in a border zone redolent of Hollywood's Casablanca, at the edge of a seemingly uncrossable desert, they languish at the Siete Mares, a hotel run by the irrepressible Casper Gutman (the inscrutable, elegant villain played by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon) -- or, if their money supply runs dry, they seek a room at one of the Camino's seedier establishments. Here they wait in terror for the eerie, giggling Street Cleaners to come to take away their bodies -- they're already dead, though most of them don't realize it. The Camino is a prison, a waiting room for obliteration, but there's a whiff of implausible hope in its decaying atmosphere. Williams locates it in the dreamers, whose devotion to love and whose willingness to reach out to each other marks them as rebels.

Camino Real is infrequently performed, because of its challenging style -- part poetry, part slapstick -- and because of the immense size of its cast. So Nicholas Martin's production is a ready-made event. It's a respectable mounting, but it certainly doesn't soar. Martin is a skillful director with an enviable skill for pacing: though it's conceived in episodes (or "blocks" on the Camino Real), the show feels shorter than its two-and-a-half-hours-plus length. But Martin is clearly more comfortable with the slapstick than he is with the poetry. He achieves the pace largely by having his actors sprint through the dialogue, which almost everyone -- Blair Brown as Marguerite and Richard Easton as Casanova are conspicuous exceptions -- approaches with a sped-up naturalism that doesn't acknowledge the beauty of the language. I felt the loss most clearly with Jeffrey Jones, who plays the narrator figure, Gutman. Marching through James Noone's impressive, complicated set with the air of a distanced proprietor, Jones gives the impression more of shepherding the mammoth ensemble through the evening than of conveying the meaning in Williams's text -- or of playing a character.

Martin's concept for Camino Real is to depict it as a carnival out of Fellini, with actors parading down the aisles and an explosion of color on the stage. But the staging is busy rather than inventive, and Michael Krass's costumes aren't flattering, either to the actors or to Williams's ideas. You don't get the sense of the poet-dreamers' triumph here; the final reconciliation of the lovers, Marguerite and Casanova, after their separate disillusionments have torn them apart, is touching, but nothing in either the staging or the design allows for the transcendence of the hero, Kilroy, over the despair of his environment. That's because the mood of poetic despair is missing, and in its place is only an undifferentiated chintziness, part Tijuana, part Ringling Brothers.

It doesn't help that the Kilroy, Ethan Hawke, is so uncharismatic. I've loved Hawke in some of his recent movies, and a clip of his performance as Vince in Buried Child included in the recent PBS documentary on Sam Shepard suggested a young stage actor willing to take big risks. Here, though, he's flat as a board, and his physical work is notably poor. Kilroy, whose name derives from the graffiti that identified the GI presence in Europe during World War II, is Williams's fondly parodic representation of the undownable Yankee spirit; Williams made him boyishly sweet, huge-hearted, and a boxing champ, in the tradition of the American athlete hero. It's an unabashedly rugged role; when he played it at Lincoln Center, a pre-Godfather Al Pacino made his entrance, unforgettably, swinging from a chandelier. Hawke gets the sweetness, but he's so shlumpy, you don't believe for a moment that his Kilroy could have won the golden gloves around his neck.

Hope Davis has some lovely moments as Esmeralda, who kindles Kilroy's romantic ardor. (Davis rarely disappoints.) And as her mother, the Gypsy, Kristine Nielsen brings some of the lunatic energy and self-invented high style she exhibited earlier this year on the New York stage in the latest Christopher Durang play, Betty's Summer Vacation (which Nicholas Martin also directed). There isn't enough of Nielsen in Camino Real, but she makes something memorably wild out of her role. She and Davis -- a strangely convincing mother-daughter duo -- and the interplay between Blair Brown and Richard Easton provide the high-flying moments in an otherwise flat-footed edition of Williams's lovely play.