Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (41 page)

Of the autobiographical confusions that
Camino
explored—confusions about politics, sexuality, mortality, spirituality, and fame—the profoundest, of which Williams was then only dimly aware, was his confusion over the conflict between being great and being good. That moral quandary is represented in the play by the innocent, sweet-natured former champ, Kilroy, who is an essential link between the script and the audience. “Audience are his friends,” Kazan wrote in his notes about Kilroy, who at one point is chased around the theater by police. “They are the witnesses to his final passion. . . . He goes and consults with them, protests to them and seeks refuge in their laps.” (Kilroy was the first character in the legitimate theater to shuttle between the aisles and the stage.) Kilroy is a king who has lost his crown. He enters with the remnants of his glory—his golden gloves—around his neck. Kilroy has a golden heart the size of a baby’s head. In order to woo the whore Esmeralda and to be her Chosen Hero, he foolishly sells his heart for cash, only to steal it back later. “He is the eternal spiritual wanderer,” Kazan wrote. “He is romantic because he is looking, wandering in search of what does not exist—eternal love. He wants to fall in love with everybody. Meantime everyone is looking to take him. HIS ONLY WEAPON IS LOVE.”

At the end of the first day’s rehearsal, Kazan took Wallach aside to give him a keynote about Kilroy. “He is full of wonder. Jimmy Durante in wonderland.” Kilroy is a totem of resilience, “utterly unaware of his own tragedy,” Kazan wrote; like a slapstick burlesque clown, he bounces back from every blow. In the midst of an extravaganza of betrayal and death, Kilroy embodies Williams’s faith in transcendence; at the finale, he and Quixote—both figures of absurd perseverance and hope—exit with a flourish through the Archway of the Camino Real and into “Terra Incognita.” “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!” Quixote says in the play’s penultimate tribute to romanticism.

On the second day—while the theater management struggled “like mad,” Milbert noted, “to keep pace on the typewriter with the flood of rewriting that Tennessee is doing! Whole new scenes—passages torn out and new ones thrust in!”—Kazan worked privately, in the mezzanine, with his principles. “During these sessions Kazan will tolerate no one about, neither an outside visitor, myself or any member of the company,” Milbert wrote. He added, “When I have had to go up with a message which could not wait, or requests for immediate information, I could barely hear the voices at the table about fifteen feet away. The emphasis seems to be on quiet, meaningful communication, without projection.”

Onstage, however, Kazan was a dynamo. “All day—Williams and Kazan finding moments—improvising lines—situations—moving people—moving, moving!” Milbert noted. Kazan fed the actors word pictures and personal memories to give dimension to their characters. To Barbara Baxley, who played Esmeralda, for instance, he said, “Kilroy represents freedom to you, and the object of all your desires. Sure, he’s a bum, a lousy American, but shut your eyes, and he’s that man you want, that sexual experience, joy, happiness, that you want. You choose him and love him. All your life you have been raised to be a whore, but inside you’re really imprisoned in the Gypsy’s place. She’s not your mother, she probably found you somewhere when you were a kid, and has raised you to make you go inside. So kick at the Nurse when you get excited, and he tries to make you go inside. Really fight him off, this is the one time you really want to break out.” He went on, “I remember the kids I saw in Munich when I was there last summer, offering themselves to you for money. Were they whores? Not really: they’re just kids, they want some fun, some joy, some escape from confinement.”

To Wallach, Kazan laid out an emotional map for his romance with Esmeralda: “You, Kilroy, you’re really jazzed now. You’re caught up in the excitement of the chase, in Esmeralda’s shouts of Champ. You’re brought back to how it was, say, in 1934. You’d walk into a bar on 98th Avenue, and they’d want to buy you drinks, everybody wanted your autograph. All right, you love your wife, but Christ, twice a year or so, don’t you want to break out and have yourself a real tear? This kid wants you, she’s a real doll, so what the hell. In this Block, when you say ‘I have only one ambition and that is to get out alive,’ you really believe for the first time that you’re going to live.”

Sometimes Kazan worked by slyly generating conflict. He took Wallach aside at one rehearsal and said, “You’re alone and you’re scared, so go on and make friends.” Meanwhile, according to Wallach, “he told the actors playing a motley crowd of peasants, ‘Ignore this stranger; he’s a gringo, and he has bad breath.’ ”

After the first run-through of acts 1 and 2, Williams noted in his diary, “Profoundly depressing. But Gadg remained strong—apparently confident and his spirit bolstered mine.” Kazan’s intention was to move Williams’s poetic drama in the direction of dance; the choreography, he felt, would lift the everyday into the ritualistic. “I wanted a production that had the bizarre fantasy of the Mexican primitive artist [José] Posada,” Kazan recalled in his autobiography. But he allowed his set designer, Lemuel Ayers—who had done the sets and costumes for
Oklahoma!
—to talk him out of his original impulse. Instead, Ayers provided a forbidding, realistic set, whose stone walls enclosed and muted Williams’s gleeful game of the grotesque. “It made the fantasies that took place inside it seem silly,” Kazan said later of the set. “I should have ordered a new setting, but I didn’t.”

On February 20, the day before
Camino Real
’s first out-of-town tryout, in New Haven, Williams allowed himself a moment of buoyancy. “The rehearsals are shaping up much better now,” he noted in his diary. “I feel hopeful again. Very close to Gadg, and fond of him. I plan to inscribe the play to him.” If the set ultimately failed the production, the wizardry of Kazan’s showmanship did not. In Williams’s judgment, at least,
Camino
was a much harder and more complex play to mount than either
Streetcar
or
Death of a Salesman
. Not only did it have an inadequate budget and inadequate rehearsal and tryout time, but, as he told James Laughlin, Kazan was working with players “at least half of which were dancers and had no previous speaking experience on the stage.” He added, “Gadg is not as fond of verbal values as he should be, but of all the Broadway directors he has the most natural love of poetry.”

Even in New Haven, the potential for controversy—the “pro-and-confusion,” as Walter Winchell dubbed the out-of-town response to
Camino
—was apparent. “Some actually hiss it, others appear delighted,” Williams wrote to Konrad Hopkins whom he was trying to coax up from Florida to the New York opening. “I think it will have the most divided reaction of any play I’ve done. Of course it’s very hard on the nerves, and yet it gives life that feeling of intensity that most of the time I find lacking.” In anticipation of the Broadway opening on March 19—a week before Williams turned forty-two—Kazan tried audaciously to preempt negative press by acknowledging
Camino
’s limitations in a Sunday
New York
Times
essay. “I’m not sure ‘Camino Real’ is as much a play as a poem,” he wrote. “It has faults, structural faults, as a play. These will be visible to the students in the drama group at Dalton School, of which my daughter is a member, as well as to the critics of the New York papers. But as a piece of direct lyric theater expression, it seems to me to stand rather by itself.”

Nothing, however, prepared Kazan or Williams for what Williams called the “militant incomprehension” of the New York critics, which “seemed like an order to get out and stay out of the current theatre.” The poetry, the politics, the play’s path-finding structure were hardly noticed in the literal-minded first responses: “The worst play yet written by the best playwright of his generation” (Walter Kerr, the
New York
Herald Tribune
); “an enigmatic bore” (Richard Watts Jr., the
New York
Post
); “overall bushwah” (John Chapman, the
Daily News
); “Camino Unreal” (Eric Bentley, the
New Republic
); ‘Camino Real’ is a serious failure . . . not the failure of a theme, or even a vision, but the most self-indulgent misuse of a talent” (Louis Kronenberger,
The Best Plays of 1952–1953
, explaining why he excluded
Camino Real
from the list). The adamance of the naysayers reflected some of the reactionary hysteria of the American moment, society’s refusal to reflect on its own dark side. Kerr actually counseled Williams to stop thinking: “You’re heading toward the cerebral: don’t do it.”

Still, there were a few New York critics who got the aesthetic message in Williams’s bottle. Robert Sylvester, writing in the
New York
Daily News
, called
Camino Real
“the first real bop play.” Brooks Atkinson noted, in the
New York
Times
, “As theatre,
Camino Real
is as eloquent and rhythmic as a piece of music,” though even he felt compelled to add, “Even the people who respect Mr. Williams’s courage and recognize his talent are likely to be aghast at what he has to say.”

Sitting in a box at the opening with his mother and brother, Williams told himself that although the play was flawed, “it surpassed its flaws.” “I knew that I was doing new and different things and it excited me,” he wrote in
Memoirs
. “I thought that they would work under Kazan. They did work, except the audience generally did not want them to work; the audience wasn’t with it at the time.” When it became clear that the critics weren’t going to allow him the satisfaction of his achievement—“I was hardly conscious of anything about me except the one all-obliterating preoccupation and anxiety with the tragic little world of my play, whirling on its way to critical disaster,” Williams said—he and Merlo, who was “a marvel of controlled cool empathy,” fled the opening-night party and retreated to their Fifty-Eighth Street apartment. At around one that morning, Kazan and Thacher, accompanied by John Steinbeck and his wife, appeared. Kazan insisted on being positive about the experience. “I’ve come out of the production feeling healed. And reinstated,” he wrote to Williams soon after the opening. “What we’ve done together has made me feel in the forefront again.” But there was no consoling Williams. “How dare you bring these people here tonight!” Williams shouted at Kazan, before storming into his bedroom and bolting the door.

Steinbeck was one of several outraged fans of the play who over the next few weeks engaged in a public donnybrook with the critics. He wrote an open letter to Richard Watts Jr. of the
Post
. The British poet Dame Edith Sitwell wrote to the
Herald Tribune
(“I believe it to be a very great play, written by a man of genius and one of the most significant works of our time”). And after a second dismissive Sunday piece about the play, Williams himself wrote to Walter Kerr:

Molly Day Thacher, Elia Kazan, Elaine Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck, 1955

What I would like to know is, Don’t you see that this play—as a concentrate, a distillation of the world and time we live in—surely you don’t think it is better than a nightmare!?—is a clear and honest picture?

Two: don’t you also recognize it as a very earnest plea for certain fundamental, simply Christian attributes of the human heart, through which we might still survive?

Three: have you no appreciation of the tremendous technical demands of such a work, its complexities and difficulties, and at least the technical skill with which all of us involved in the production have managed to meet them?—As far as I remember at this moment, you made no mention more than perfunctory of music or choreography or the great plastic richness contributed by the designer, Lem Ayers, and you certainly did not go a step out of your way to give due tribute to such brilliant performances as Wallach’s and Barbara Baxley’s. . . . And how about the work of Kazan? To undertake this play took a very notable courage, since no director ever tackled a play more difficult, and there were pieces of staging in it the like of which I know, and you know, that you’ll wait many and many a season to see again.