A wall with eclectic images that have inspired the costumes for Calixto Bieito's production of Tennessee Williams' âCamino Real."  IF American audiences have heard of the Catalan theater and opera director Calixto Bieito, it is probably because of his brutal 2004 production of Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio” in Berlin, in which local sex workers simulated masturbation and oral sex onstage. Or because of the opening scene of Verdi’s “Masked Ball” in Barcelona, with its gang of political conspirators sitting on toilets in a grimy men’s room.  Now there’s another sequence to add to this highlights reel, one from Mr. Bieito’s new version of Tennessee Williams’s ardently poetic, little-seen play “Camino Real,” which opens Sunday at the Goodman Theater here.  Music blares. A swaying woman slowly mimes sewing up the vagina of her near-naked daughter. The veteran actor André De Shields saunters forward, snarling “I Put a Spell on You” as an orgy commences.  These few minutes provide all the sex, violence and surreal trashiness to justify Mr. Bieito’s reputation for being controversial and provocative. Less predictable, perhaps, is the quiet love scene that follows all that raucous spectacle. It’s less showy, less broad, less, well, Bieito-like.  The tension between lurid incitement and passionate tenderness is a crucial element in Mr. Bieito’s style, but until now American audiences have only heard the incendiary sound bites. He has been known in Spain since the early 1990s and over the last 15 years has become one of the busiest and most prominent directors in the world. But other than a savagely funny Scottish production of Calderón’s play “Life Is a Dream” that traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999, Mr. Bieito’s work has not been seen in this country. “Camino Real” is his de facto American debut.  The contemplative moments of the production are even more disturbing than the garish orgy. “You cannot do this play if you don’t know the darkness inside of Tennessee Williams,” the soft-spoken Mr. Bieito, 48, said after a recent rehearsal. “He was all the time looking for love and freedom and hope. It is very important for me to have friendship and some hope. But sometimes I’m very pessimistic, and we’re living in very difficult times. I think about what the future will be for my kids, and that feeling is what I try to put onstage.”  Rehearsing the love scene, he asked the performers to emphasize the characters’ fragility and fear. The actress tried it a new way, with tears in her voice. Mr. Bieito then adjusted the blocking of one moment so that the pair no longer looked at each other; they now sat side by side, facing the audience as they delivered their dialogue. Little by little, the scene grew less naturalistic but more moving, an intimate drama of two people unable to connect.  “I don’t want to make this a silly joke,” Mr. Bieito told the actors. “I prefer that it be very emotional. It’s a fantasy. It’s a dream.”  Or, more precisely, a nightmare. “I think shock is a really good thing,” said Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman, recalling the “Abduction” production in Berlin. “And his work shocked me. During the performance one audience member shouted: ‘Stop this! Stop this filth!’ Some people applauded that; other people booed it. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen, to see people that involved in their response to a piece.”  Mr. Bieito has become best known for his work in opera, which now dominates his schedule, but he got his start in theater. His breakthrough hit came in 1998 with Lorca’s “House of Bernarda Alba,” and he was the artistic director of the Teatre Romea in Barcelona from 1999 to 2011.  Mr. Falls first invited Mr. Bieito to participate in a 2009 Eugene O’Neill festival, but their discussions eventually turned to Tennessee Williams and “Camino Real,” an ambitious, ambiguous allegory from 1953 that joins fantasy characters with those from history and literature — Casanova, Don Quixote, Lord Byron — in the ominously policed plaza of an unnamed, vaguely Latin American border town whose inhabitants wait in anxious stasis, unable to escape.  The second in the series of collaborations between Williams and Elia Kazan, it came six years after their galvanizing Broadway production of “Streetcar Named Desire” and immediately followed “The Rose Tattoo” (1951). But the original production of “Camino Real” had a stolid, naturalistic set that clashed with Williams’s hallucinatory lyricism. Audiences were confused, and the play has remained on the outskirts of the canon.  Mr. Bieito received free rein from the Williams estate to adapt the play as he saw fit. Working with one of his regular collaborators, the playwright Marc Rosich, he deleted whole scenes and interpolated material including songs and Williams’s poetry. At the very end a wrenching passage from Williams’s memoirs proposes freedom as the goal of writing, closing with words that could speak for Mr. Bieito’s artistry: “If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being at all?”
The Catalan director Calixto Bieito has a reputation for being provocative. American audiences will get a chance to see for themselves with âCamino Real,â at the Goodman in Chicago.