On Stage

...These two separate strands, however, were never properly welded together, having in common only a thematic congruence...

...Peter Wexler's costumes and set, as well as John Gleason's lighting, are superior conceptions...

...Camino Real, after all, is a great but nevertheless immensely difficult play...

...The play reaches its most heroic pitch as he cries out: "Make voyages!-attempt them!-there's nothing else...

...Ominously obese-recalling Sydney Greenstreet-buono creates an evil presence that the playwright neglected to describe fully...

...It rightly belongs to the rank and genre of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken-visionary, twilight works in which the aging dramatists felt they had earned the right to forsake a traditional structure in order to express the dark poetic yearnings of a more private muse...

...Written at a pivotal point in the playwright's career, Camino Real somehow achieves the stature of a last play...

...Employing the Strindbergian mode of a dream play in Camino Real-an elastic form for getting everything in-williams in his prologue posits the entire dramatic action as a dream inside the head of Don Quixote, the archetypal questing hero...

...What we get instead is a striking example of a director's inability to control the trademark style of an actor struggling to become an established star...

...But in Williams' dream world the hero is asked to surrender both his sex and his life...

...Ironically, it is just here, in the inflated middle, that the acting is at its best...

...Replete with simulated sex, comic fake rituals and magical incantations to make the dead land fertile again, Camino Real was Williams' shot at writing "The Waste Land...

...The chief concerns of such testaments are always the immanence of death and religious transcendance...

...Like bad sex, the flow of action freezes...

...And when Quixote speaks of the blue ribbon at the end of his lance as a reminder to an old knight of the distance .he has come and the distance he has yet to go, McVey feels compelled to touch the ribbon and wave it toward us to make sure we all see and know what he is talking about...

...And Jessica Tandy gives a performance that I will be talking about years from now...

...But what might have been a great moment for the American theater became instead a mixed bag of beautiful effects and blurred readings...

...He removes the autopsy from the stage altogether, and cuts Madrecita's choral lines, substituting an incomprehensible Spanish translation that is chanted and moaned in a false show of agony...

...It is precisely this sort of underlining that turns the play into slowly dripping maple syrup, transforming its poetry into rhetoric...

...Instead, this scene is rushed through without allowing the dramatic energy implicit in perverted pleasure to emerge...

...This powerful speech, which culminates with Byron's determination to sail for Athens, serves also as an apology for playwright Williams' life-as in a much larger sense does the entire play...

...Making instant electric contact with the audience at the expense of the play, Pacino sacrifices both the innocence and pathos implicit in Kilroy's character...

...As written, it is a triumph of visual poetry and contrapuntal music: While state doctors perform an autopsy on Kilroy, searching for his golden heart, the blind Madrecita keens over his body and brings him back to life with a touch of a flower...

...But what does director Katselas do with this scene...

...All well and good...

...Kilroy's comically ineffectual seduction of Esmeralda should result in frenzied awkward rhythms, climaxing in the agony of meaningless orgasm...

...The embodiment of the mythic, ubiquitous soldier of American Fortune, Kilroy finds himself in the company of such legendary figures as Casanova, Camille and Esmeralda-williams' way of saying that the American soldier, and the middle-class culture that produced him, is the end of the line for the romantic tradition...

...It is in the last act, which treats of sex and resurrection, that Katsel-as' direction is at its worst...

...When it premiered on Broadway in the pre-Beatnik '50s, the play was greeted by incredibly hostile reviews and stayed alive only long enough to leave a wistful memory of its passing...

...It will take much trial and error before we learn how best to force this work to surrender both its secrets and its power...

...But it is with this very opening that the Lincoln Center production, directed by Milton Kaste-las, commences to unravel and go awry...

...When it comes time for the last grand aria (a speech that is fortunately included in the program on the page opposite the cast listing), Miss Tyrell chops it up into so many little meaningless pieces that one wonders if Lincoln Center will ever be able to put Tennessee Williams together again...

...Jessica Tandy as an aging Marguerite Gautier beginning to frighten at the thought of death, delivers a performance of classical dimensions -aware, as others are not, of the speeches as arias that require the range and inflection a singer brings to song...

...There is an affecting nobility about this ex-prize fighter with a bad heart...

...Lumbering down one of the side aisles toward the marvelously imaginative set-Its most prominent and functional feature, a futuristic stairway that curves grandiosely toward nothing in particular-patrick Mc-Vey as Don Quixote begins speaking in a weary, sarcastic W. C. Fields voice...

...Yet, with all these faults, this is in some respects a valuable production...

...The angry confusion major critics professed to feel when the play first opened stands now only as an index to the traumatized sensibility of that scared generation of repentant radicals...

...Clifford David's Byron also reveals a moving sensitivity for vocalic coloration...

...Eyes moving lasciviously, tongue darting in and out as a sign of savvy, his Kilroy swaggers around the stage like a stand-up comedian letting the world know that Dolly's back in town...

...Unhappily, it is Kilroy's resurrection that suffers most damage...

...For Williams too much wants goodness and the workings of the heart to win, and arranged a Active world to make sure they do...

...In a lengthy declaration describing the burning of Shelley's body and how Edward Trelawney plucked the poet's heart from the midst of the fiery rib cage, Byron at last begins to look within himself to find the private point of failure in the romantic quest...

...Looking like a late graduate from the Dead End Kids, Pacino does an imitation of Leo Gorcey imitating Ruth Gordon...

...It is not, however, Williams' excessive sentimentality so much as Al Pacino's Kilroy that really whacks up this production...

...Cruelly undercutting the framing action that contains the play, this fuzzy piece of mimicry supplants the requisite image of heroic endurance...

...The coincidence of timing is not without significance, inasmuch as both works are a response to the exhaustion of a tradition: Godot, presenting the dry bones of minimal drama, represented an act of profound resignation and a first step toward silence...

...A major fault in the construction of Camino Real-and the Lincoln Center production inadvertently calls attention to it-derives from Williams' expanding the work from an original one-act version into a full-length play...

...Filled with messianic longings, Kilroy is the protagonist of Camino Real, the young hero whom Don Quixote will choose to accompany him when he awakes from his dream...

...In a directorial stunt that is dramatically startling, Pacino enters by descending from the top of the auditorium, riding down on a wrecker's sky hook right into the middle of the audience...

...Yet once on stage, he archly mugs his way through a role that asks a special kind of restraint...

...In this very uneven production that alternatively irritates and excites to pleasure, Victor Buono successfully maintains a sinister narration from the dark side of the moon, freezing the blood as he announces each scene...

...After hocking his most precious possession-his Golden Gloves-to escape the Camino Real, he impulsively decides to remain and participate as the Chosen Hero in a local ritual: taking the virginity of a Gypsy's daughter, a maidenhood annually restored by the rising of the moon at festival time...

...He left Kilroy to wander somewhere off-stage in the second act while the affairs and fortunes of the literary characters occupy our attention...

...The result is the most muddy, awkward moment of the play, a mangling of Camino Real's key scene...

...Lincoln Center has at least bravely followed Lord Byron's advice: "Make voyages!?Attempt them...

...while Camino Real, flooding the stage with a fatty, rich overflow of literary symbols and metaphorical conceits, tried to recapitulate the romantic tradition in a desperate last-ditch attempt to effect its resurrection...

...When the street cleaners come to cart him off as garbage, Kilroy shadowboxes these surrealistic emissaries of the state, collapsing finally like Cyrano from the fatigue and futility of doing battle with the gods of death...

...If this were not bad enough, Susan Tyrell as Esmeralda is turned into a freaky fractured China doll...

...and then suddenly, the director begins desperately cutting large chunks from crucial scenes...

...A parable of the individual in the fascist state, Camino Real today obviously means so much that it almost sinks under the weight of its own significance...

...That was 1953-the same year that Waiting for Godot was first performed in Paris...