Camino Surreal

Camino Surreal

I saw a thought-provoking production of Tennessee Williams' Camino Real last weekend, produced by the local Art House Productions. It's one of those ambiguous stories that you could spin a lot of theories about. You could say it's simply a dream, which would be too dismissive, I think. You could say it's about people -- including such literary personages as Casanova and Lord Byron -- trapped in a sort of purgatory. (It reminded me a little of a highly disturbing episode of an old anthology TV series called Ghost Story that starred Patricia Neal as a woman who gradually realizes that the hotel she's staying in is, well, only what appears to be a hotel. Whoever wrote it may have had Williams' play in mind.) But it's probably best not to try to reduce such abstract stories to a literal, linear, connect-the-dots plot. Let a thousand meanings bloom.