Williams in Williamstown

On the last day of the first weekend of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a brief storm struck. We had gone into the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, on Williams College’s campus, for a matinée of “Camino Real”—a rare revival of Tennessee Williams’s oddest play, from 1953—under a lid of hot gray clouds; we emerged into a fresh, cool summer’s day. We might never have known there had been a violent deluge if various phones in the theatre hadn’t set off their awooga awooga klaxons at once.

But even sirens can’t disrupt the bizarre logic of “Camino Real,” which is itself a sustained series of alarms. Williams’s title is deliberately confusing; we are at the “end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real,” a character says while reading a map, punningly carrying us away from the Spanish for “royal road” and into the uncharted mysteries of dream. The setting is a dusty town square, bordered on one side by the posh Siete Mares Hotel and on the other by the city’s worst quarter, fronted by the Ritz Men Only, a dangerous flophouse. Heat-dazed tourists—are we in Mexico? Morocco? Spain?—are drawn to the seductive locals, who pick pockets and give the wrong change. When a visitor can’t pay his keep, military police take aim with their pistols, and cackling street-sweepers whisk the body away.

This sort of exoticized nightmare plot might remind you of other works by Williams, such as his gothic thriller “Suddenly Last Summer,” from 1958, in which a mob of Spanish children kill and partially consume an American sexual predator. The mood in “Camino Real,” though, is far lighter—you can feel the playwright subsiding into the heat in a kind of feverish lassitude. The director Dustin Wills has co-designed a surreal set, full of shabby, sentimental sweetness, with the designer Kate Noll. At the play’s outset, a painter sits on a bosun’s chair high in the air, brushing clouds onto a mural of a pretty blue sky. The tourists are not real, either, but icons out of time: the lover Casanova, the ubiquitous Kilroy, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. These characters’ unifying quality is exhaustion. Pamela Anderson, a cultural icon herself, plays Alexandre Dumas’s Marguerite, also known as la Dame aux Camélias, in a wilting stupor; Ato Blankson-Wood plays Lord Byron, who worries that he’s lost his inspiration. Making art, being art—it all feels like too much to bear.

W71—the seventy-first season of the summer festival, which was founded a year after “Camino Real” premièred—is trying to assure us that the enterprise is anything but exhausted, even after enduring such troubles as the pandemic shutdown and a campaign against the use of intern labor. Now the “Slave Play” playwright Jeremy O. Harris has been named creative director, and the event has adopted some of his glamour and bustle. In a curtain speech before “Spirit of the People,” Harris’s own hallucinatory play about tourists and locals in Mexico, he spoke about having difficulty writing after the success of “Slave Play” and credited the Berkshires for helping him finally complete a new work. “For me personally, this is a place to experiment and clarify,” he said, before thanking the festival for the opportunity to show a play that was still raw. He explained, with a catch in his voice, that it was not open for review—actors had been getting new text just days before we arrived. Harris’s programming also features a production of “Not About Nightingales,” directed by Robert O’Hara, and, improbably, an ice-dancing work, performed at a nearby rink, called “The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason,” created by the director Will Davis and based on a Williams novel. The decision to focus on Williams at Williamstown stems, Harris has said, from their shared queer Southern sensibility, but in his speech before “Spirit of the People” he indicated another kinship, that of two playwrights locked in a kind of existential struggle with their own writing.

Harris has chosen from the wilder blooms in Williams’s garden: “Camino Real” is certainly unpruned, both thuddingly symbolic—Nicholas Alexander Chavez plays a boxer who literally has a heart of gold—and nakedly self-regarding. Byron complains to his host that he cannot compose, sounding much like a playwright who has been disoriented by his own success. “The luxuries of this place have made me soft. The metal point’s gone from my pen, there’s nothing left but the feather,” Byron says, before he walks through a portal, either to exaltation or to death.

Dream plays are difficult to execute—whimsy is easily crushed by clumsy handling. “Camino Real” looks like a million well-spent bucks, and, when Blankson-Wood or Chavez is speaking, it briefly sounds that way, too. As a creator of images, Wills gets sharper and more inventive as more people flood the stage. As a manager of actors, though, Wills does not always help his performers with humor (which requires precise timing) or, crucially, with volume. Anderson’s Marguerite, in particular, who carries much of the defeated romance of the play, often sounds like she’s whispering her lines to herself. Plenty of “Camino Real” is deliberately obscure, but its secrets still deserve to be heard.

“Not About Nightingales,” an early and long-unproduced work, from 1938, might well be the Williams play for the moment—it seems certain that we will see it again soon. Set inside an island prison, where the power-drunk Warden Whalen (Chris Messina) torments inmates with bad food and deranged punishments, “Nightingales” follows the story of Eva (Elizabeth Lail), his new secretary, who grows fascinated by the prison’s “model” inmate, Jim (William Jackson Harper). Jim has begun to liberate himself through deep reading, and everyone—even his nemesis in the cellblock, Butch (Brian Geraghty)—can feel the way his mind makes the prison walls bow and flex.

Whalen complains that his prisoners are ungrateful, even as he sends them to a torture chamber, a radiator-lined sweatbox that becomes the central metaphor in Williams’s play. Heat of all kinds is just turned up and up, to the point that Eva’s hysterical sexual appetite—she swoons for Whalen, and falls into an erotic clinch with Jim during a full-blown prison riot—can sometimes seem a little silly. Instead of turning the temperature down, O’Hara amplifies Williams’s homoerotic elements: Butch’s friendship with another prisoner now includes graphic onstage seduction, and nearly every male character reaches for another at some point, which, with only a few exceptions, makes the play seem both oddly horny and strangely honest.

As in “Camino Real,” the sheer size of the cast has left the festival in an awkward position; the calibre of the performances can be uneven. Geraghty is strong, and Harper is searing, but Messina, though he’s dutifully put on a mustache and a Southern accent, doesn’t summon the menace required for Whalen, which leaves the rather long play running on two wheels. Messina seems particularly hampered by Diggle’s set design, which consists of cell bunks against a kind of glittering black curtain, pierced by a single doorway that leads into a pulsing red light. The choice of abstraction isn’t always successful—“Kiss of the Spider Woman” done with garbage bags, I thought briefly—and Messina isn’t the only actor who seems most at ease when he can be confined by something real, like a desk, or a bed.

Indeed, Williams himself seems freer here than he does in “Camino Real,” hemmed in by such real things as the lives of these men, the clanking radiators they hear, the list of foods they eat. The prison is hell, but it’s also a good container for the particular lyrical shapes that Williams loves. At one point, Jim tears a page out of a book of Keats and throws it across the room—he hates the poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” he says to Eva, because if he had the freedom to write he wouldn’t waste it. Jim knows there are better things to describe than birds. ♦