(Chris Jones’s article appeared in the Chicago Tribune, 3/12.)
The playwright John Guare once wrote that the title of Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real," a wildly free-form 1953 poetic pageant set in a crummy tropical outpost with shades of New Orleans, Tangier and Havana, embodied both the glamorous Spanish world of one's romantic dreams (savor those elongated vowels) and their seedy, squalid, choking doppelganger. When pronounced "CA-mino Reel," Guare wrote, this place felt like "the Yale I was living in, where the spring of humanity has gone dry."