Calixto Bieito Adapts "Camino Real" at Goodman Theater CHICAGO - "This place is confusing to me," says Kilroy, the permanently punch-drunk ex-prizefighter hero of Tennessee Williams's "Camino Real," who has landed in a Latin American town from which he cannot seem to escape. I think it must be the after-effects of fever. It might be amusing to poll audiences exiting the Goodman Theater here, where a spectacularly lurid production of Williams's drama, directed by the Catalan provocateur Calixto Bieito, runs through Sunday, to see how many feel a need to reach for the thermometer. I suspect the majority of them would be unable to describe, even in vague outline, the play's plot or general import. That's not a knock on Chicago theatergoers, most of whom sat in respectful silence while various sexual acts were graphically simulated onstage, and cordially applauded at the play's conclusion. If this production were my sole exposure to "Camino Real," I think I'd be thoroughly mystified, too. Certainly "Camino Real" is among Williams's more outré, challenging plays from his prime. Originally directed by and dedicated to Williams's frequent collaborator Elia Kazan, it was mostly greeted by bafflement when it played briefly on Broadway in 1953. Set in the plaza of an unnamed city, an existential way station where various lost souls and libertines of literature - Casanova (David Darlow), Marguerite Gautier (Marilyn Dodds Frank), Lord Byron (Mark L. Montgomery) - have gathered to succor their bruised hearts and seek release from the oppressive forces ruling over them, the play is a both a symbolist pageant and a dark hymn to the beauty of love and its sadly fleeting comforts. Mr. Bieito, a celebrated and controversial director best known for his radical opera productions (most famously a "Masked Ball" featuring a chorus on toilets), turns the play into a seamy nightmare taking place in the disoriented mind of Williams himself, who is depicted in the prologue playing the role of Don Quixote, after a fashion. The adaptation, by Mr. Bieito and the Catalan playwright Marc Rosich, takes major liberties with the original text (itself significantly rewritten by Williams after the play closed on Broadway), but none is more questionable than this interpolation of Williams himself into the action. Staggering around the stage, drinking from a bottle of vodka and popping pills, Michael Medeiros delivers a meandering monologue before falling to the stage in a stupor. He is then approached by an ominous suited figure who proceeds to pop the cap of the vodka bottle into the unconscious man's mouth. Convulsions and his apparent death ensue. This allusion to the circumstances of Williams's own accidental death is tasteless in itself, but it also has the effect of suggesting that the play to follow, presumably the playwright's last dream, represents the confused outpourings of a poisoned, disordered mind. Sad to say, that is a reasonable conclusion to draw from Mr. Bieito's willfully warped production. The set, designed by Rebecca Ringst, leaves the Goodman stage bare save for a towering back wall suggesting a cage that the characters clamber up and down, seeking escape from the brutal social order of the town. The mysterious forces who rule it are here represented only by a cop figure (Jonno Roberts) and Gutman (a suitably creepy Matt DeCaro), the proprietor of the Siete Mares Hotel, where the town's more financially secure denizens reside. But since there is no suggestion of this hotel onstage, or of the fountain in the center of the plaza around which much of the action unfolds, or of the seedy establishments on the opposite side of the street, it is hard for the audience to get its bearings as the strange, episodic action unfolds. Mr. Bieito has also eliminated Gutman's announcement of the passing "blocks" on the Camino Real, the royal road. Williams's setting and his narrative design were important to the playwright, who wrote in an essay printed in The New York Times before the play opened that its seemingly chaotic structure "is the result of painstaking design, and in this work I have given more conscious attention to form and construction than I have in any work before." In reordering and reassigning some of the dialogue, eliminating some minor characters and interpolating several songs (mostly sung in Spanish, with some featuring texts drawn from Williams's poetry), not to mention adding generous helpings of flagrant sexual stage business, Mr. Bieito strips the play of such coherence and thematic cogency as it has (which is not, to be honest, a great deal), without supplying any of his own discernible layers of meaning. Most of the performers remain onstage throughout the play, wandering zombie-like in the shadows when they are not singing their songs or reciting their dialogue, some of which represents Williams at his most overwrought or obvious ("We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God").