Target Margin's The Really Big Once

Trying to reunite Williams and Kazan



That same tension—the desire to make sense of a play on the one hand, and the desire to give over to its make-believe on the other—animates the plot, such as it is, of The Really Big Once. In 1946, Williams wrote the subtropical fantasia Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, which Kazan urged him to expand from a one-act into a full-length play. Kazan fought for greater intelligibility, sending notes such as "But Christ, does it need integration and clarity!" Williams, by contrast, insisted that he wanted his play to "make my points by evocation and poetic allusion" and "give these audiences my own sense of something wild and unrestricted." This conflict resulted in a notorious 1953 Broadway flop, starring Eli Wallach.

A fantasia on a fantasia
Sue Kessler
A fantasia on a fantasia


The Really Big Once
By Target Margin Theater
The Ontological Theater
131 East 10th Street, 212-352-3101

Herskovits and his cast cobble together their play from primary sources—letters, telegrams, autobiographies, ministrations from Kazan's widow. The ensuing script is highly abstract—you, like Kazan, may long for greater "integration and clarity." But the show's few standard bio-play scenes, more comprehensible and more dull than what surrounds them, should kill that craving. If The Really Big Once ultimately fails to make the case for the importance of Camino Real, it speaks well of Herskovits's desire to continue Williams's mission—to forsake the neatness of psychological realism for something messier, wilder, more true.

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