Word: camino
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Died. Lemuel Ayers, 40, top stage (Pajama Game, Camino Real) and screen (Meet Me in St. Louis) set and costume designer, Broadway co-producer (Kiss Me Kate) ; after long illness; in Manhattan...
...Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first recorded European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean. Balboa's discovery led to the conquest of Peru, and by 1535 the Spaniards were feverishly carting the gold and silver loot of the luckless Incas over Panama's Camino Real (Royal Road) to the tall treasure galleons that sailed for Spain. Last week a 28-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant, who has already retraced Balboa's path, was completing his rediscovery of Panama's historic routes with a rugged crossing of the old treasure trail...
...machetes. But the 1955 expedition was safer; radios could quickly summon help in the form of rescue helicopters. In an emergency, the roar of a whirly-bird's engine might well sound more beautiful than the clinking of all the gold that once went over the jungle-crowded Camino Real...
Though time & place are deliberately not specified in Camino Real, they seem modern and Mexican. The scene is a fortresslike, claustrophobic public square featuring such darkly symbolic places as a luxury hotel, a flophouse, a brothel, a pawnshop, and such darkly symbolic figures as a callous worldling who spits on common humanity, Storm-Trooperish policemen who cudgel it, street cleaners who cart its bodies off to the city dump. Around an arriving young American prizefighter with a bad heart flow loan sharks, plutocrats, cooch dancers, madams, homosexuals, a Casanova on his uppers, a Camille who herself must buy love...
Williams has created a phantasmagoria of brutality, treachery, corruption, has doused it with sex, punctuated it with farce, dyed it in melodrama. Doubtless the play is at times revolting because it sets out to convey the author's own revulsion; and Camino Real is perhaps excessively pessimistic in reaction against Williams' previous Rose Tattoo, with its factitious "affirmation." But very excessive it is-and not only excessively black, but excessively purple. Camino Real lacks philosophic or dramatic progression (on that score, it might claim the dead-endness of a wasteland), but it also lacks all discipline and measure...