Obie-Award Winner Dustin Wills Returns to Williamstown.

John Guare wrote in his iconic introduction to the 2008 New Directions publication of Camino Real that the play "has a very small bull's eye. It's difficult to hit, but when you do, when you do—the world's a brand new place." I agree.

In Tennessee’s  own words: “To me the appeal of this work is its unusual degree of freedom. When it began to get under way I felt a new sensation of release, as if I could "ride out" like a tenor sax taking breaks in a Dixieland combo or a piano in a bop session. [...] My desire was to give these audiences my own sense of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water in the mountains, or clouds changing shape in a gale, or the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream.”

Here we have a dramatist at his peak attempting to redefine the American theatrical form through freedom. Imagine that. Writing like that in the same year as Arthur Miller's The Crucible; a year when artists' heads were daily offered on the chopping block of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I mean, this play features Baron de Charlus paying a male trick to fuck him at a dingy hotel, on Broadway… in 1953. AND, get this, it’s a comedy! Tenn wrote uncensored in a time of censorship. Fearless. He fashioned in Camino Real a multi-faceted prism refracting the preoccupations of a rudderless mid-century America, the impossibility of creating art under Authoritarianism-masquerading-as-Democracy, the distinctly American Capitalist abandonment of Romantic sensibility, and the cosmic collision of desire and desolation. The world of Camino Real does not look unlike America today.

Camino Real is, in my entirely objective, unwavering, factual opinion, Tennessee Williams' greatest work. It's a shame that the pea-brained critics of the New York theatre scene of the early-Fifties refused to meet this masterpiece even halfway. I imagine had they done their jobs, the entire American Theatre—not to mention Tenn's future work—could have charted an entirely more adventurous, strange, unbound course. Absolutely, Camino Real is utterly decadent, even chaotic, in its brushstrokes, but the gestalt is clear: it is a clarion call to the Romantics of the world—drowning in an ocean of cynicism, suspicion, and censorship—to use their indefatigable spirit as a life raft.

I have a well-documented talent for organizing chaos, a bloody-minded rigor for honesty, a bone to pick with America, a deep well of desire lacking an object, a discomfort with money because I never had it, an unparalleled passion for this play, a dangerous curiosity, an overwhelming appetite for knowledge, an ability to say “I don’t know”, a restless heart, an unbound imagination, a Gemini sun, Pisces moon, and ascending Libra: this play has been waiting to meet me in the flesh for so long. I’m assembling a dream team for it.

– Dustin Wills, Director