Two months ago, I posted a message about "Camino Real,"
the Tennessee Williams play that I anticipated seeing in performance.

The performance happened last month.
I was with a group of ten to fifteen people who went together in a small van.
The play's reputation is deserved: it is long and difficult, and hard to understand.
I was actually very entertained by the whole thing, I believe this is because
I prepared for the experience, reading the play thoroughly and reading some commentaries and analyses of the play.

Others in my group were not thus prepared for the play,
and I recall one woman who was so frustrated by the experience of sitting through the play
that she lashed out in anger afterwards.
Our van driver (who went out for pizza while waiting for us)
asked the woman, "What was it about?"
And the woman snarled, "NOTHING! It was about NOTHING!"

Well, I knew that "Camino Real" would have some people scratching their heads in puzzlement, it's that type of play.
And it is likely that I won't see it again anywhere.
So I am grateful to have seen the play at all in any production.

I think of the play as a metaphor for purgatory, for a plane of existence
which attracts people whose lives are over, and who are still earthbound,
still attached to the lives that they lived.
The play takes place over one night, and part of a morning, in its setting.
And one can imagine the lost souls who populate the place
re-enacting the same events day after day, unable to break the cycle.
There are two or three characters in the play who transcend the setting
and move on;
two of them do so together at the end of the play,
making for an upbeat ending.
Like I say, I'm glad I saw it once in my life.