The Really Big Once
David Barbour
April 20, 2010: Target Margin Theatre continues its exploration of Camino Real -- one of Tennessee Williams' greatest failures -- in The Really Big Once. A 60-performance flop on Broadway in 1953, when Williams was at the height of his success, it proved to be a dark preview of his future. A largely plotless fantasy, Camino Real centers on an innocent American palooka named Kilroy who finds himself trapped in a nameless, apparently Mexican, city that is also a kind of police state. His fellow prisoners, all yearning for escape, include Lord Byron, Marguerite Gautier (a/k/a Camille), Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Kasper Gutman, the sinister figure from The Maltese Falcon. It's an allegory of flight and imprisonment. Williams' fans love to insist that Camino Real is one of his finest works, but I've yet to hear of a production that has earned any acclaim. However, in its muddied dramatic line, its flagrant use of symbols, and its wildly florid language, it points the way to the author's final decades, when, out of favor and dogged by personal demons, he produced a series of works -- The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Out Cry, and The Red Devil Battery Sign among them -- that left audiences frustrated and bored.
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