As much as I hated it when I saw it last spring, I’ve got to admit that the Goodman Theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real got one thing profoundly right. Director Calixto Bieito added a character—Williams himself—and had him wander through the show, bearing witness and serving as a kind of human sacrifice to the god of addiction. True to his overall aesthetic, Bieito did his best to degrade this figure, who wore a cheap raincoat, drank from a paper bag, jabbered, and spat out a bottle cap during his death throes—a crude reference to Williams’s actual death by asphyxiation. But the basic notion of having the playwright haunt his own play was insightful. Few authors are as thoroughly present in their oeuvre as Williams was and continues to be. Perhaps because he wrote so compulsively and returned so often to his own primal scenes, Williams seems to have transcended the whole concept of aesthetic distance. His work isn’t just autobiographical, it’s hyperbiographical—everything is saturated with him.
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That being the case, it may be that Bieito felt he had to mock and murder Williams in order to exorcise him from Camino Real and make the play his own.
The beautiful young man this time around is Chance Wayne, a child of the deep south, raised poor by his mother in a town called Saint Cloud, “somewhere along the Gulf Coast.” The die was cast for Chance in his teens, when he simultaneously got the acting bug and fell in love with Heavenly Finley, the free-spirited daughter of local political chieftain Boss Finley. Heavenly reciprocated with a wild passion, but Boss had other ideas. A self-made man fond of telling folks how he came down out of the hills, barefoot, at 15, Boss decided that Heavenly (and he) could do a whole lot better than Chance. He exiled the boy, who made up his mind to show them all by getting rich in Hollywood and coming back for his beloved.
Cromer’s star leads, Diane Lane and Finn Wittrock, are surprisingly ineffectual. Certainly, Keith Parham’s oddly diffuse lighting design does them no favors. But the real problem is that they’re miscast. Chance is rock dumb, a not-so-distant cousin of Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy; Wittrock conveys an intelligence that renders the character’s choices inscrutable when they should be foolhardy. Lane just doesn’t look like the ruin del Lago is supposed to be.
Through 10/25: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, also Tue 10/16, 7:30 PM, no show 10/10 and 10/11, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $23-$68.
