Camino Real is Playwright Tennessee Williams' most agitated protest and least effective play. In it Williams is in flight, more than ever before, from theatrical realism. At the same time, he is appalled as never before by reality itself. Using the gaudiest of theater tricks—florid language, Hellzapoppin explosions, surrealist juxtapositions—he has shattered the familiar outer shell of life to reveal decadence and rottenness within. But in doing so, he has partly succumbed as a writer to what as a moralist he would expose.
Though time & place are deliberately not specified in Camino Real, they seem modern and Mexican. The scene is...