BWW Reviews:: Off The Wall Opens the Heart of Tennessee Williams in CAMINO REAL

Perhaps a playwright or poet discovers hidden beauty in the blackest of subject material---the places buried deep his dreams and heart. Tennessee Williams' 1953 play Camino Real appears to illustrate the darkest human emotions can be spoken in haunting poetic language to challenge the actors and audience alike.

Milwaukee's Off the Wall Theatre (OtWT) and Artistic Director Dale Gutzman (Named a 2015 Milwaukee Artist of the Year) proves once again a challenge will be worth an evening's admission price to his production of William's surreal play. Gutzamn also takes on the role of the older poet, often seen as an aged Williams, inhabiting this fictional town of desperadoes and literary characters

The entire evening in the play's story may only be a dream, what Gutzman describes as a dream of passion .A vision Williams has allowed himself to imagine after he falls into a drunken stupor in the town's main plaza. The place "Where old meanings are remembered, and new ones discovered."

Williams set the action in a Spanish speaking small town barricaded in this production by chain link fences, a semi-military encampment, which constrains the inhabitants from leaving this seemingly collison of San Antonio and New Orleans culture. While gypsies and street cleaners roam the town, a collection of literary characters---Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron, Esmerelda and Baron de Charlus--freely intermingle with an American Boxer named Kilroy. Kilroy was a golden gloves champ until he learned he had a "heart the size of a baby's head," which prevents him from fighting any longer, his dream once ulfilled, idealism, and then afterwards, destroyed, disillusionment.

Kilroy's heart and the heart of these characters grab the audience's attention using Williams own words. Whether Williams speaks frquently of the heart: the heart of his youth, or someone who has outlived the tenderness of the heart, whatever is left in my heart, my heart that is too tired to break, pure hearts, and hearts of gold. Or finally, as Lord Bryon says, "the heart that translates noise into music, and chaos into order."

These poetic gems in Williams' dialogue consider all matters of the heart in this desolate town where the actions can be distressing and uncomfortable while the audiences considers what lies within their own hearts.

A savvy and gutsy up to this passionate task cast adds emotional weight to Williams's words, also directed by Gutzman along with assistance from technical director David Roper. Marilyn White plays a tenacious and yet appealing Marguerite Gautier, Camille, to Jeremy C. Welter's aging Casanova, finally longing for love instead of lust at the end of his life. The pair romances while the two battle between seeking tender love or merely growing used to each other.

Alexandra Bonesho gives Esmeralda a seductive edge and also adds an innocent touch to her persona as the gypsy's daughter whose virginity can be restored by a fiesta on the night of the full moon. Add in Robert Hirsch playing Lord Byron, Claudio Parrone, Jr. overseeing the street action in the rolfe of Gutman, and Nathan Danzer who proves to be the boxer sadly trying to avoid his impending death in the role of Kilroy.

While these actors play major roles in the complete cast of 16, Gutzman re-envisions Williams' least produced play-critics in the 50's divided their opinions on if this was his masterpiece or a misconception of his work--with modern twists based on a version produced by Calixto Bieito, which also merges humor to the tnese action.

The OTWT production gives the audience Williams' sensuous language although asks contemporary questions: What constitutes heart in youth and maturity? What does the word brother mean, both in blood and in friendship? Who can be called sincere and how does society define sincerity? How much reality, such as the realities depicted in Camino Real, can humankind eventually bear?

With a profusion of continually more alienated people in American culture, perhaps gving over their lives to loneliness as the aging population booms, what does Williams' disturbing and provocative play ask the theatergoers to uncover so that "old meanings may be be remembered and new ones discovered?"

Gutzman explains in the program notes the name Camino Real has a dual meaning. One, the royal road to dreams, hopes and romance or two, the real road. What was Williams speaking to? OTWT clashes beauty, the strength of poetry in the language, with the harsh truths the world faces, a division to what the human heart experiences. Explore which road might be chosen, in one's dreams or reality, on a a compelling evening at OTWT with Tennessee Williams.

Off the Wall Theatre presents Camino Real by Tennessee Williams at 127 East Wells Street hrough June 14 Their next production features the musical Spring Awakening and begins July 23. For information or tickets, please call 414. 484. 8874 or visit www.offthewalltheatre.com

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