Camino Real

By Tennessee Williams @ Williamstown Theatre Festival. Photos by Maria Baranova. Directed by Dustin Wills.

“Camino Real ... is itself a sustained series of alarms. The setting is a dusty town square, bordered on one side by the posh Siete Mares Hotel and on the other by the city’s worst quarter, fronted by the Ritz Men Only, a dangerous flophouse. Heat-dazed tourists—are we in Mexico? Morocco? Spain?—are drawn to the seductive locals, who pick pockets and give the wrong change. When a visitor can’t pay his keep, military police take aim with their pistols, and cackling street-sweepers whisk the body away.

Making art, being art—it all feels like too much to bear. W71—the seventy-first season of the summer festival, which was founded a year after “Camino Real” premièred—is trying to assure us that the enterprise is anything but exhausted.”

— Helen Shaw, The New Yorker