Camino Real - Schedule, Program & Tickets

A luxury hotel, a shabby flophouse, a market square, and behind the city gate: nothing but desert. Tennessee Williams' poetic, rarely performed dream piece about stranded characters at the end of the world. A piece full of humor and music - Calexico, long-time companions of director Anna-Sophie Mahler, are writing new music exclusively for the production and are also on stage live at the performances.

"To freedom. That is the longest journey a person can take."

A port city, somewhere in Latin America. The beginning and the end of the world. Behind the mighty city gate: nothing but desert. In the market square, between a luxury hotel and a shabby flophouse, stranded people meet: lost characters who don't know how they got here, let alone how they could leave it again - this dead end of the Camino Real, the royal road. There is Jacques Casanova, the lonely womanizer. And Esmeralda, straight out of Victor Hugo's novel THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. Don Quixote with his squire Sancho Panza. Marguerite, the legendary "Lady of the Camellias" from Alexandre Dumas' novel of the same name. The poet Lord Byron. And last but not least, a young boxer named Kilroy, with a heart of gold, as big as a "baby's head": with wide eyes he looks over the wall at the borderland. He doesn't know what's waiting behind the border either - and yet he dreams of getting away from here. "Kilroy was here."

Tennessee Williams, actually notorious for his realistic plays, tried something completely different with CAMINO REAL (1953): a fantastic, free and absurd dream play, full of humor and music - and yet deeply thoughtful, soul-mate with the existentialism of Sartre or the Final Station plays of Beckett. Williams described it as "nothing more and nothing less than my understanding of the time and the world in which I live." And so his characters, thrown into the existence of this mysterious, capitalist border town, struggle for freedom, recognition and attitude - between the fear of social decline and the longing for a different life.

Live on the stage of the Volkstheater in this dream world are Martin Wenk, Joey Burns and John Convertino from the band Calexico from Tucson, Arizona. Their legendary mix of styles from Mexican Mariachi, Tex-Mex, country rock, jazz and folk has founded its own genre: "Desert Noir", which itself originates from the border region between Mexico and the USA. Their music explores realms of haunting melancholy, profound beauty and infectious euphoria, with which they have delighted their audience for thirty years.

Calexico wrote completely new music especially for CAMINO REAL. Director Anna-Sophie Mahler has a long-standing friendship with the band – she played the violin on Calexico's first European tour in 1999.

Subject to change.