Camino Real by Tennessee Williams

First published: 1953

First produced: 1953, at the Martin Beck Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: An unnamed Latin American country

Principal Characters:

• Gutman, an expatriate
• Kilroy, a soldier
• Casanova, a womanizer
• Lord Mulligan, a noble
• Lady Mulligan, his wife
• First Street Cleaner , and
• Second Street Cleaner, representatives of death and its aftermath
• The Gypsy, a street vendor
• Esmeralda, the Gypsy’s daughter
• Don Quixote, as himself
• Lord Byron, as himself
• Jacques, and
• Marguerite, a pair of lovers
• Baron de Charlus, a nobleman

The Play

Camino Real is an untraditional play. An innocent stranger, Kilroy, arrives in the town of Camino Real only to be tempted by the lures of its degradations—including prostitutes hanging out of windows—a world where he is promptly robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Yet it is the character of Gutman, the expatriate, bellowing out the window and announcing stage changes like a surreal town crier, who breaks down the play’s imaginary fourth wall and invites the audience to consider the true horror: This is no “play,” no predictable exposition-climax-denouement farce, but rather, this is the mind itself (if not in the throes of death, then at least confronting them). It depicts a situation in which Kilroy confronts the facts of his existence: A former boxing champ facing his life’s choices for the very last time, wondering if he has really done his best after all.

Camino Real is divided into a prologue and sixteen “blocks,” scenes with no perceptible time lapse between them. There are intermissions indicated after blocks 6 and 11. The play is set in an unnamed Latin American country at a bustling tropical seaport, Camino Real, which bears a resemblance to such widely scattered ports as Tangiers, Havana, Casablanca, or New Orleans. When the curtain rises, there is a loud singing wind on a darkened stage accompanied by distant, measured reverberations like pounding surf or distant shellfire. The town plaza is seen fitfully by this light. On stage left is the luxury side of a street, containing the facade of the Siete Mares hotel. Its great bay window holds a pair of elegant “dummies” with painted smiles—one seated and one standing behind looking out into the plaza. Opposite the hotel is Skid Row, which contains the Gypsy’s gaudy stall, a loan shark’s establishment, and the Ritz Men Only, a flea-bag hotel.

The sixteen street blocks that make up the Camino Real are stretched between two worlds that are the creations of the human beings inhabiting them. On one side are the attractions of the Siete Mares, a place of luxury but one also underlaid with corruption and evil. Dominated by the threatening and sinister Gutman, the Siete Mares is soon revealed as a place of mysteriously appearing unclad female figures of simultaneous lush, overripe sensuality and decay. Here lives the ultimate lover, Casanova, hopelessly pursuing the faded beauties of his youth, who must now wear the white camellia, a symbol of the lateness of his life. The hotel is also the refuge of the Lord and Lady Mulligan, whose substantial fortune can no longer buy them happiness or ensure their escape from the awful fate of the street cleaners’ carts. Indeed, the street cleaners are representative of death and its aftermath, of the fact that the dead cannot clean up after themselves. The street cleaners and their carts come to symbolize the unpleasant truth that when humans die, they leave a decaying carcass behind, a fact that, for Williams, is as repellant as the moral misdeeds these same people committed while alive.

On the other side of the square—the other “half” of the world of the Camino Real—the contrast is stark. Here exist the “lower” classes, worse off than those at the Sieta Mares, but in a different way. This other half of the world is where the brass-lunged Gypsy sells her magical insights as well as her nubile daughter, Esmeralda. It is a location close to the pawnshop that will take one’s private treasures and one’s life for a pittance. It is also the realm of the Ritz Men Only, with its terrifying “little white ships sailing the night,” to which nobleman Baron de Charlus must flee after he experiences his ultimate degradation, a moment when his most precious possessions are thrown off his balcony like garbage. The “white ships” refer to the meager beds to which the unwanted men flee, the death beds where they will expire, alone, unwanted, and forgotten, their white sheets soon to be used as funeral shrouds.

Don Quixote, Lord Byron, and Kilroy appear as mythic figures, the archetypal wanderers, famous idealists foolishly seeking meaning where none is to be found. Quixote finds his quest for honor to be futile, Byron finds love to be an illusion, and Kilroy finds that youth and glory have already deserted him. For Williams, then, the journey is the destination; to think otherwise is to be as deluded as his characters, lost in a world of appearance and phantoms.

Thus, the characters of Camino Real come and go, flashing before the audience’s eyes as at the moment of death, the freaks at the sideshow who represent all the stinging aches of missed opportunities and harsh, never-ending regrets. Even the fiesta, centered in the square and meant, as are all fiestas, to take one’s mind off the burdens of existence, becomes the place of humiliation for the staunch Kilroy, who is forced to give up his golden boxing gloves and don a clown suit. Here, too, Casanova is betrayed, replaced by a younger, more potent lover. The Gypsy tells her fortunes, and, as the moon rises, she swears it has restored the virginity of Esmeralda. For the once virile Kilroy, now the faded champion, manliness offers no escape from death, no matter how hard and fast he runs. In the end, he becomes the chosen hero, the one to be destroyed—able to free himself, but only at the cost of his life: The street cleaners come for Kilroy as they come for everyone.

Dramatic Devices

One dramatic technique of Camino Real is its setting, outside of time, in a place of no specific locality. In creating this figurative setting, Williams makes the play an elaborate allegory in order to derive philosophical import from the play’s fantasies. The play remains a record of Williams’s conception of the time and world he inhabited, the confused, repressed postwar world of the 1950’s. The people of this world are mostly archetypes distilled from “real life”: individuals whose characteristics are exaggerated until they become colorful grotesques. Accordingly, the play is unusual in its degree of freedom and its divorce from linear plot structure.

As Williams noted, Camino Real entails the construction of another world, a separate existence. Accordingly, the play is divided not into traditional acts but into “blocks,” a construction that represents the modern conception of time; one that is not linear, but one that is fragmented. This fragmentation of experience suggests the momentary focus on the instant, the episode caught in time and frozen in space. Here the audience may linger in the hidden corners of human motivations, where behavior is as clear as it is complex. The play refuses to accept time as sequential or as something that all human beings experience uniformly.

Williams’s aim, then, was to provide audiences with a sense of something wild and unrestricted, a portrayal of nature’s chaos, as in the changing shape of a storm or the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream. Yet this sort of freedom does not point to a carelessness in Williams. On the contrary, the playwright took great pains in crafting the play, giving conscious attention to form and structure so as to render the wildness of human emotion. In a foreword to the play, the author expresses his belief that freedom is not achieved simply by working freely.

The play was first directed by the legendary director Elia Kazan, who was attracted to it for its mobility of form. Indeed, both the playwright and the director saw the play as a metaphor for flight, for the impulse to take wing and escape. Accordingly, with Kazan’s work in staging and Williams’s work in cutting and revising, both artists worked toward a common goal: the achievement of a continual flow. Monologues were mercilessly cut wherever they seemed to obstruct or divert this flow.

Critical Context

Of all Williams’s plays, Camino Real was the one he most wished people to see onstage rather than read in a book. It was, as the playwright stated, the one most suited to the “vulgarity of performance.” Accordingly, he saw this vulgarity as part of the excitement and intensity of live theater, a theater meant for seeing and for feeling once the pattern was set in motion. Indeed, rather than exist as dead words on a page, Camino Real, according to Williams, should appear as “the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud.”

Judging from both newspaper reviews and audience reaction, Camino Real baffled and exasperated a large number of people, a response that both confused and hurt the playwright. Indeed, Williams claimed that he was being quite serious and that he never supposed that the play would seem obscure and confusing to anyone who was willing to give it a chance. Still, audiences walked out on the play in droves, demanding that the action needed clarification.

For his part, Williams remained unapologetic. He did not agree that the play needed an explanation, declaring that as a work of art, a play should just be rather than mean something. Nevertheless, a number of critics attacked Williams for what they saw as an excessive use of symbolism, to which the playwright could only reply that symbols existed as the natural speech of drama. For Williams, then, a symbol had only one legitimate purpose: to say something more directly, simply, and beautifully than it could be said in words. Symbols, he argued, were the purest language of plays: It would take page after page of tedious exposition to render an idea that instead could be conveyed on a lighted stage with a simple object or gesture.

In the end, Williams accepted the fact that the untraditional narrative of Camino Real would never appeal to theater patrons whose tastes were more domestic and simple. As a play, Camino Real threatened established conventions, dismantling classical expectations as it forged a new sense of artistic freedom. Although Williams never claimed to have written a great play, he did wish his audiences to share in the sense of release and liberty he had experienced while writing it.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Carr, Virginia, ed. Studies in the Literary Imagination. Atlanta: Georgia State University Press, 1988.

Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995.

Londre, Felicia. Tennessee Williams. New York: Ungar, 1979.

Rader, Doston. Tennessee, Cry of the Heart. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985.

Rouse, Sarah. Tennessee Williams. Jackson: Mississippi Library Commission, 1976.

Williams, Tennessee. Three Plays of Tennessee Williams. New York: New Directions, 1964.