Director makes Goodman debut with risky 'Camino Real'

For theatergoers inclined to take risks, who don't mind being provoked and are willing to step outside - way outside - their comfort zones, Goodman Theatre's audacious, engrossing revival of Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real" is a must-see.

Those who favor a realistic narrative and a more straightforward plot will likely disagree. For them, the impressionist, loosely plotted "Camino Real" - whose title is Spanish for "royal road" - emerges as a rather bumpy ride. That comes as no surprise, when the man behind the wheel is Spanish director Calixto Bieito, a provocateur who has been praised and pilloried throughout Europe for his controversial opera stagings.

Good thing he's used to it. I suspect "Camino Real" will deliver more of the same.

"Camino Real" - a sprawling, poetic exposé of desperate, damaged souls who've come to a dead end and cannot turn themselves around - marks Bieito's second U.S. production, his first of an American play. He definitely lives up to his reputation with a daring re-imagining of the rarely produced 1953 play, which he adapted along with his frequent collaborator, Spanish playwright Marc Rosich.

Bieito's incarnation has its share of shocking and disturbing moments, most of which involve sexually explicit (sadomasochistic) and violent scenes that will likely put off more sensitive or squeamish audience members. The polite but tepid applause that followed Sunday's press opening suggested that it already has.

Unsettling as it is, I found Bieito's "Camino" riveting. Fearlessly acted and imaginatively staged - against a soaring chain link backdrop that suggests the cage in which these characters find themselves - it recalls the take-no-prisoners type of theater typically found in Chicago storefront venues, not on a venerable stage like the Goodman's.

This incarnation of "Camino" quotes from Williams' poems, his plays - including "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Glass Menagerie" - and other works. Moreover, Bieito and Rosich take the unusual approach of locating Williams within his own play, using him to frame the drama which ultimately emerges as a nightmarish glimpse into the fevered imagination of a poet.

Williams appears in the guise of the disheveled, booze-addled Dreamer (poignantly played by Michael Medeiros), whose wristband ID suggests he checked out of a hospital against medical advice. The play - which Bieito conceives as the playwright's prolonged hallucination - opens with the Dreamer stumbling into "Camino Real," an unnamed, Central American town presided over by Gutman (played with dispassionate menace by Matt DeCaro). A cross between a midlevel wiseguy and a hotel manager, Gutman keeps the peace with help from his shady, jackbooted enforcer (Jonno Roberts), the shotgun-wielding cop who serves as the terminator in this terminus.

Consigned to "Camino's" shoulder, the Dreamer observes the town's haunted, lovelorn, dissolute inhabitants - Casanova, Lord Byron and Marguerite Gautier (the courtesan Camille) - whose final destination is the Siete Mares Hotel, a five-star establishment when it comes to brutalizing and humiliating its guests.

Enter Golden Gloves champion Kilroy (Antwayn Hopper in an electrifying Goodman debut), an unfailingly decent man and washed-up boxer forced to retire because of a bad heart. Abandoned by his traveling companions in Camino Real - where "the spring of humanity has gone dry" - he falls prey to Gutman and his cohorts, yet manages to hang onto his humanity which persists even in the face of brutality.

David Darlow plays the aging Casanova - of the powdered face, dyed hair and leather trousers - who pursues Marilyn Dodd Frank's still refined Marguerite, who pays for pleasure that passes for comfort. Gliding effortlessly across the stage is Andre De Shields, courtly and compelling as the libidinous Baron de Charlus from Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." He stands in sharp contrast with Barbara E. Robertson's wrecked streetwalker Rosita, whose crude come-ons reveal a desperate need for love - which all these characters desire but can't achieve.

Mark L. Montgomery has a brief but stirring turn as Byron, whose impassioned call-to-arms for the individual and the artist ("make voyages, attempt things, there is nothing else") is among this show's most heartfelt and inspiring moments.

Rounding out the cast is Carolyn Ann Hoerdemann's opportunistic Gypsy, who pimps out her daughter Esmeralda (the lithe and fearless Monica Lopez); Travis A. Knight's dismissive Abdullah, the hustler who strips Marguerite of her pretensions, and Jacqueline Williams' deeply compassionate Madrecita de los Perdidos, who perceives through sightless eyes the human destruction around her.

The action unfolds under James F. Ingalls' unforgiving lighting, on a dark, mostly empty stage designed by Bieito collaborator Rebecca Ringst. She manages to conjure a pretty - even whimsical - fiesta from garish neon that can never entirely conceal the black hole that is Camino Real.

“Camino Real”

★ ★ ★ ½

Location: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St., Chicago, (312) 443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org

Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday through April 8. No 7:30 p.m. shows March 20, April 1 and 8. No 2 p.m. shows March 17 and 22

Running time: About 110 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $29-$79

Parking: Discounted parking with Goodman validation at the Government Center Self Park, at the southeast corner of Lake and Clark streets

Rating: For adults only. Mature themes, violence, strong sexual content and nudity