Off the Wall Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ little-known Camino Real is like a dream that percolates in the mind for years to come. Archetypes of despair and entrapment populate a place whose name means both “the royal road” and “the real road”—a militantly guarded no-man’s-land where “the spring of humanity has dried up.” Here we follow washed-up boxing champion Kilroy (the eminently likeable Nathan Danzer) as he meets the other denizens, falls in love and faces his own mortality. The story is surreal and, as director Dale Gutzman notes, “It’s not a play based on plot, but a play focused on poetry and the power of words and images.”
David Roper’s production design is full of chain-link fence and strobe lights, effectively evoking the run-down, nightmarish environs. The score features a poignant blend of Jazz standards, can-can and even a few show tunes—all wistful, all haunting.
Gutzman plays the Williams corollary character with good-natured exactitude and his adaptation features a large ensemble of thoughtful actors. As aging provocateurs Casanova and Marguerite, Jeremy C. Welter and Marilyn White are arresting in their ongoing argument about whether their attachment is based on tender love or being used to each other “like a pair of hawks in the same cage.” Claudio Parrone Jr. is perfectly sadistic as Gutman, the town enforcer, and Carole Herbstreit-Kalinyen is deliciously amoral as his foil, a gypsy pimping her own daughter; in a memorable scene, she counsels, “They’re all sincere when they lift your little veil. It’s a natural instinct that doesn’t mean anything.” As the seductive serial virgin, Alexandra Bonesho brings vivacity to a role that refuses to be anything so simple as a downtrodden innocent. James Strange’s Baron De Charlus is elegant and tragic, his sexual masochism an embodiment of deep compassion and “mercy among the damned.” Finally, as Lord Byron, Robert Hirschi delivers the story’s most redemptive lines with grace and verve. From him we learn of Williams’ belief in love as saving grace: “The heart translates noise into music, chaos into order.”
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Sensorially intense and intellectually riveting, Camino Real runs through June 14 at 127 E. Wells St. For tickets, call 414-484-8874 or visit offthewalltheatre.com.
