Review: Pamela Anderson and Nicholas Alexander Chavez Take a Trip Down the Camino Real of Tennessee Williams

Once upon a time, Tennessee Williams threw Don Quixote, Casanova, Lord Byron, Esmerelda, Camille, and a young American boxer named Kilroy into a haunted plaza at the end of the road and made them claw their way out. Like this mysterious vista, the play is called Camino Real, and it’s a hallucinatory trip into the Twilight Zone that predates Rod Serling’s television series by six years. If you’re confused, you’re not alone: so are Kilroy and his compatriots.

Camino Real is not one of the Williams plays that gets trotted out often; like Not About Nightingales, this current revival (under the direction of Dustin Wills at Williamstown Theatre Festival) might be the only time you get to see it. That’s enough to entice a Williams completist, though the casting of Hollywood stars Pamela Anderson as the fading Marguerite “Camille” Gautier and Nicholas Alexander Chavez as the handsome Kilroy, who has an enlarged heart the size of a baby’s head, is probably what’s getting the bulk of the audience in. They both deliver, even if the play itself is fully baffling.

Abandoned by Sancho Panza, windmill-fighter Don Quixote (Frankie J. Alvarez) falls asleep while searching for a replacement squire and dreams of this town outside of time, where a deluxe hotel for the wealthy, presided over by the villainous Gutman (Vin Knight), stands on one side, and a flophouse for vagrants and degenerates exists on the other.

The heroic former championship boxer Kilroy (Chavez) enters, so desperate for cash that he pawns his golden gloves. Kilroy encounters the aged Casanova (Bruce McKenzie), now poor and in love with Marguerite (Anderson), who has apparently survived her death from consumption and has lost her tenderness in the process. And what of these street-cleaners who toss dead bodies into their wagon for future dissection? Well, Kilroy finds out he’s next.

Chavez is everything Williams could ask for in a clean cut, all-American leading man with a streak of desperation, and Oana Botez costumes him in the tightest of white undershirts and boxers, which is also what Williams would have no-doubt asked for. There’s definitely a Brick and a Stanley and a Chance in his future, and I’d be very eager to see it. Late in the play, he shares a very affecting scene with Whitney Peak, who brings quiet empathy to the role of Esmerelda—from The Hunchback of Notre Dame—here imagined as a prostitute undergoing a ritualistic restoration of her virginity. The longing between them is palpable; you really want for them to rescue each other, even as she remains physically and metaphorically shackled to Skid Row.

Anderson is an example of particularly clever casting, a real-life femme fatale trying to change her long-worn image. While her voice could use a bit more amplification (Johnny Gasper did the muddy sound design), the ghost of her past self is as impactful as the ghost of Camille’s on Marguerite. There are equally engaging performances from Knight, who will make your skin crawl, Henry Stram as the pathetic Baron Du Charlus, April Matthis as the all-seeing Gypsy, and Socorro Santiago as the blind La Madrecita.

Wills’s staging is fluid and never boring—not with acrobats and musicians flittering around—but I couldn’t quite tell if he had a strong enough handle on the dramatic arc of the play, or if the play doesn’t have one, or if I just missed it. Still, he’s built a world unto itself, one with expressive lighting by Barbara Samuels and a wide-open set that he designed with Kate Noll, which allows for maximum physicality. It’s Anderson who wins that MVP award—watching her clinging to someone’s leg as he drags her across the stage is genuinely hilarious.

Camino Real is more of an audience-pleaser than Not About Nightingales, but it’s the ultimate “your mileage may vary” show. You’ll either leave transcended, like Don Quixote, or lost among the denizens of this Williams-built Twilight Zone.