Camino Real at The Theatre @ Boston Court
*** Just added: read reviews of Camino Real (pdf)
The Theatre @ Boston Court and CalArts’ School of Theater are banding together for their first co-production: Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real. It promises to put a modern face on Williams’ 1953 play.
Camino Real is set in a nondescript, Spanish-speaking land, where lost souls from literature—including Don Quixote, Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Casanova, Lord Byron—inhabit a place from which they cannot escape. Originally directed by Elia Kazan, it served as a departure from Williams’ previous works, such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo, dabbling in absurdist and experimental realms. The critics of the time were not kind, but since its debut, Camino Real has earned its place among the other notable titles in Williams’ oeuvre.
Jerry Tallmer, legendary NYC theater critic, founder of the Village Voice and creator of the OBIE Awards, reminded readers of Williams’ and Kazan’s original intentions:
‘Camino Real is an imperfect play,’ Kazan wrote in A Life, his unsparingly frank autobiography, ‘but it is beautiful, a love letter to the people Williams loved most, the romantics, those innocents who become victims in our business civilization. The central character, Kilroy, is a homeless mid-American boy [and onetime Golden Gloves champ, at least in his own mind] who, wandering without direction over the earth, has arrived at the final, mysterious place where Death waits.’
Directed by Jessica Kubzansky, a 1994 CalArts School of Theater alumna and co-artistic director of the Theatre @ Boston Court, and produced by current MFA Theater student Kathleen Reinbold, the cast includes CalArts student actors, faculty, alumni and professional actors who have worked with Boston Court before, including Theater faculty Marissa Chibas as Camille, Tim Cummings as Casanova, Lenny Von Dohlen as Don Quixote, and current Theater School students Matthew Goodrich as Kilroy, Kalean Ung as Esmeralda and Brian Tichnell as Gutman.
Camino Real previews for six performances beginning tomorrow (Feb. 4) and opens on Feb. 12.