-

and enjoy Dobama's 'Camino Real'

Audience can't sit back and enjoy

By Peter Bellamy It will take a glutton for abstruse and often meaningless symbolism, imagery and allegory to derive much pleasure from "Camino Real," which has

opened the Dobama Theater season.

There is no doubt that the production of this Tennessee Williams' venture into surrealism and fantasy is an enormously amibitious

one, with its cast of 37, its 16 scenes, countless props and sound effects.

However, there are dull spots and banal lines. The play has positive and even lurid theatrical qualities, but it lasts for two hours'

and 55 minutes and there are times towards the last when it seems interminable.

The drama was first produced on Broadway in 1953 and ran 60 performances. The Dobama presentation is in line with the theater's admirable policy of offering only plays which have not been seen in the immediate vicinity of Cleveland.

There is violence, despair, cynicism and idealism in "Camino Real," and Williams would seem to

stage

screen

bloated rich and such noto-

rious or famed characters rious or famed characters as Casanova, Lord Byron, Don Quixote and Camille.

On the other side of the plaza are slums where street cleaners resembling Harpo and Groucho Marx

indicate that this is the worst of all possible worlds. pounce upon the dead to cart them off to the city There is also music, dancing, screaming, sirens and beat anybody who tries to dump. Merciless police beat anybody who tries to pistol shots. step out of line.

The locale is a plaza in a Central American city. On one side is a luxury hotel and cafe patronized by the

The slums also have a cheap flophouse, a pawnshop and a bordello and teem with prostitutes, men-

dicants, homosexuals, driftera," a wig suggesting ers, thieves and street Franz Liszt and an almost

vendors.

Presented as a dream nightmare of Don Quixote, the drama has two love

affairs. One involves Casaaffairs. One involves Casanova as a frightened remittance man and Camille, who is reduced to buying the love she once sold.

The other pairs a gypsy whose virginity is restored with the rising of the moon. at fiestas and an itinerant American merchant seaman, a former Golden Gloves champion called Kilroy.

As Casanova Tedd Burr has a costume reminiscent of "The Phantom of the Op-

comic Italian accent. His florid characterization is a burlesque.

Robert Gutin evinces a remorseless contempt for humanity as the luxury hotel manager. James Kusyk, as the Joe Palooka-type Kilroy, lends his role a touching, artless innocence and simplicity.

John Klein is coldly menacing as the homosexual Baron and invests the personality of "Nursie" with the hilarious lunacy of a Crazy Guggenheim.

Director Don Bianchi and the cast have made a tremendous effort to make the

play work, and if it doesn't it's the playwright's fault. An actors' play it is. An audience show it isn't