The Great Society
loves The Rose Tattoo
By TONY VELLELA
When a person gets a tattoo, unless it’s the name of a loved one, it’s meant to depict something from real life. In the case of the dramatic valentine “The Rose Tattoo,” by Tennessee Williams, the object of adulation is a rose. As presented in the current revival at the American Airlines Theatre, starring Marisa Tomei, that reality is skewed toward the cartoonish, despite its rich entertainment value.
Serafina Della Rosa, the Sicilian widow of a banana truck driver, took almost exclusively to remaining indoors ever since her husband was run off the road and killed, in connection with his side practice of running drugs stashed under his legitimate cargo. It unfolds in the American South, centered around a small village on the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, due to decisions made by director Trip Cullman and set designer Mark Wendlund, her stultifying, provocative choice to cut herself off from others is undercut because they have decided to eliminate the walls and roof to her house. She is instead inhabiting an open-space platform accented only by some furniture, a few door frames, a window and a small alter to the Virgin Mary. And this demi-house is perched on a stretch of sand bordered by hundreds of plastic, stationary pink flamingoes, pointing toward stage right. Overall, the effect is one of a story set adrift from the real events and feelings of its inhabitants rather than allowing the claustrophobic element that so defines its heroine from landing with the impact it should.
When we meet Serafina, who makes her living as an accomplished seamstress, she is finishing the protracted undertaking of sewing white graduation dresses for the girls of the town. Her fifteen-year-old daughter Rosa is among the graduates. But because Rosa spent a few evenings with a sailor she met at a school dance, Serafina has confined the young girl to her bedroom, naked, as punishment for being “a wild thing in my house.”
The ladies of the neighborhood, populated with immigrants from Sicily, chide Serafina when she appears on her front porch clad only in a slip, to escape the heat of her living room, stiflingly hot because of the house’s tin roof. [Williams had a thing about women and tin rooves.] The local strega [a Sicilian old woman who spouts admonishing homilies] who heads up the women when they congregate in front of the house, warns Serafina that “there is something wild in the air, no wind but everything’s moving . . . I can hear the star-noises.” She counsels Serafina to end her self-inflicted confinement and mingle with the other ladies. Serafina resists, insisting that she is honoring the memory of her beloved husband, who was both a good provider and a world-class lover, to her mind, the best. His ashes are encased in a ceramic jar on a shelf in the living room.
On graduation day, when the ladies come to retrieve their daughters’ special dresses, they find Serafina as disheveled as always, but even more agitated, having learned of her daughter’s transgression. They explain that the young man is the brother of one of Rosa’s friends, and that he is a polite young man. But Serafina refuses to believe that nothing untoward took place between the couple, after the dance, and the following night, following a visit to the movie house. When Serafina finally relents and permits Rosa to make it to the ceremony, the girl decides to bring Jack, the sailor, back home with her, to meet her mother, and dispel her of any tawdry notions she has conjured up. Jack’s visit becomes a comic opera of the mother insisting that the modest sailor, who swears he is also Catholic and a virgin, kneel before the homemade shrine Serafina has constructed in the corner of the living room, complete with rose-colored glass containers that hold lighted candles. Tentatively satisfied that he will respect her daughter, Serafina relents, and Rosa and Jack high-tail it out of there to join friends on a picnic outing. Serafina’s misgivings are not entirely misplaced, though, when we see the couple alone, with Rosa smothering the sailor in kisses, showing the same fiery passion that defines Serafina.
Her life is unended upon the arrival of a muscle-bound hunk of a truck driver, who was forced off the road by another driver, causing his truck to be damaged, and his delivery to be late. After the two fight, the driver implores Serafina to let him in the house, where he can sob in private. “I always cry after I fight,” he explains, and she joins him, noting that she always cries whenever someone else does. The man is called Mangiacavallo, [Emon Elliot], which in Italian means “eat a horse.” He relates the family legend that, back in Sicily, a grandfather was forced, due to lack of food, to consume one or starve to death, and that the truck driver is named in his honor. His effusive behavior borders on slapstick, causing Serafina to bemoan that “he has my husband’s body, but with the head of clown.”
In a precursor to a modern ‘meet cute’ tale, he returns that night, stays over, and early the next morning surprises Rosa, who is asleep on the sofa. Tantrums and yelling ensue. Serafina confides to the strega that she is pregnant! Happy ending.
This revival manages to get the story straight, relating what Tennessee intended to be the story he invented, dedicated to Frank Merlo, Williams’ long-time lover and partner, and himself a former sailor. And while it was meant to present a host of comedic moments, there are stark serious threads women throughout the text, not the least of which has to do with the widow’s undying devotion to her idealized dead husband. It is only when she accepts the truth that the whole town already knows, that her husband was carrying on a long-term affair with a brazen blonde casino worker, that she loosens her self-imposed exile, and permits the clown driver to come back at night, and stay with her. He bemoans his fate as someone with three dependents, now possibly out of a job, and the object of her pity.
This production benefits from Tomei’s seemingly boundless energy, which explodes periodically whenever she needs to enforce her daughter’s confinement, or when she is taunted by the neighbor women, and their children. Tomei certainly presents the picture of devotion carried to the extreme, and the other players are equally adept at depicting their characters. The exception is Elliot, who, from the start, is the picture of comic overacting, making it that much harder to believe that Serafina would give him a second look, despite his obvious visual attractiveness.
This “Rose Tattoo” does strain to retain some of the touches Williams wrote in, especially the continuing appearance of women chanting, usually omitted in other productions, but definitely something that adds to the operatic nature of the tale. Recall the off-stage singing in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” So it is certainly worth a look, in particular to see the range Tomei is capable of. But you will still need to read the play to get the full impact of the tale.
If there is one thing that Robert Schenkkan’s “The Great Society,” now at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, has, it is impact. Brian Cox stars as the 36th president. Tasked with the monumental undertaking of recounting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s years following his assumption of the office following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the story needs to fold in a host of characters who legitimately belong in this retelling. They range from civil rights icon, Grantham Coleman’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Garrison’s renegade Alabama governor George Wallace as well as future discredited President Richard Nixon, to Bryce Pinkham as brother JFK’s Attorney General and New York Senator Bobby Kennedy, Marc Kudisch’s challenged Chicago mayor Richard Daley, Gordon Clapp’s FBI dictator head J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Thomas as LBJ’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. There are at least a dozen other ‘players’ in this saga.
While there are those who fault the play for its detailed chronicling of the events that crammed LBJ’s timeline during those fateful years, 1963 through 1969, there is simply no other way to present what the pressures were on this man. Known for his dedication to civil rights, including voting rights, and his mastering of political manipulation of his at-the-time fellow senators, as well as the kneecapping effect of the build-up and increasing escalation of the conflict in Vietnam War on every other goal he held dear, any life this epic must by definition be ‘overstuffed’ with facts and details. The stunning oppression alone of the assaults on the Edmund Pettus Bridge would make for an evocative, gripping story. The openly-adopted replacement of non-violence with Black Power in the black community left him with little to bargain with. He spent five long years battling traumatic travails foreign and domestic, in a career poised to mirror his idol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also attempted to balance an overseas war with a struggling society at home. And the nearly inevitable foretelling that this was a story that would not end well came when America’s most trusted man, newscaster Walter Cronkite, counselled LBJ that the war was a lost cause. Just as any reviewing of the life and times of FDR must necessarily include the involvement of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, vice-president Harry Truman, his wife Eleanor, as well as intimate advisor Harry Hopkins, so too must “Great Society” call on the contributions of the many people who affected LBJ’s efforts.
The unavoidable drawback of attempting such a comprehensive telling of his story is that those who may not be conversant with the names and events of his time may not fully grasp how the interplay of all these elements influenced the man’s tortured presidential years. A comparatively quiet scene near the end, with LBJ and his devoted wife Lady Bird, trying to reconcile how much his political career has cost them, stands out as a look into the damage done to one human being, as the casualties numbered upwards of 40,000 from the War. Most actors carry out their responsibilities quite well, with Pinkham’s Bobby Kennedy a stand-out, while Thomas’ Humphrey underplays the man’s gregarious nature to the point of making him simply a constricted ‘yes man.’ This is theatre at is gripping best – a time spent in an audience treated to a work that is, not stolid but solid in its dramaturgical choices, one that satisfies even without the knowledge afforded those who benefit from having lived in the period it covers.
AfterPlay
Eli Wallach once told me about the difficulties he and Maureen Stapleton, who both originated the leads in “The Rose Tattoo” in 1951, had with the play’s producers. They were committed to doing the play, but were wary of how wrong choices with casting could sink it. Williams wanted Italian actress Anna Magnani to do the female lead, but producers feared her heavy accent would prevent most audience members from hearing her dialogue. And they were conflicted on how to choose the right actor to portray Mangiacavallo. Finally, after being called back to audition again and again, Eli, speaking for both of them, told the producers “either cast us or stop asking us back.” They got the roles. Williams got Magnani for the 1955 film version, earning her an Oscar, and instead of going with Wallach for the male lead, they bowed to the demands of box office familiarity in choosing Burt Lancaster for the part . . . contemporary choreographer Chase Brock’s acclaimed evening-length production ‘The Four Seasons’ will be presented in a strictly limited 21-performance run on Theatre Row from November 21 to December 8. Tickets can be purchased at telecharge.com, by phone at 212-239-6200 or at the Theatre Row box office . . . Wheelhouse Theatre Company will present a staged reading of Jonathan Lynn’s “Oracles: Murder at the Crossroads and Oedipusgate – a Double Bill,’ at Manhattan Theatre Club Studios on Thursday, 10/31 at 1:30 PM, and Friday, 11/1 at 11 AM. Details at contact@wheelhousetheater.org . . . Theatre for Humanity has announced its inception and inaugural season with Alfred Litwak’s “The Far Horizon,” at the A.R.T./New York theatre, 502 west 53rd street = TFHNYC.org . . . “Let ‘Em Eat Cake,” the comic political satire with a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and music and lyrics by the Gershwins will be the opening offering from MasterVoices, directed and conducted by Ted Sperling. It will be performed on Thursday, November 21 at Carnegie Hall. Details about MasterVoices can be found at mastervoices.org.
On Book
To read more about his stint in “The Rose Tattoo,” as well as his remarkable stage and film career, check out “The Good, the Bad and Me – In My Anecdotage,” Eli Wallach’s easy-read Harvest Book autobiography from Harcourt . . . among the myriad volumes about Tennessee Williams, stand-outs are ‘Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks,’ edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton [Yale University Press] and the Williams biography “Pilgrimage of the Flesh” by John Lahr, from Norton & Company . . . and to get some insight into a mayor who gave LBJ so much angst, track down Mike Royko’s “Boss – Richard J. Daley of Chicago,” from Dutton & Company.
TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS theatre-themed series ‘Character Studies.’ His play “Admissions” won the Best Play Award at the New York International Fringe Festival, received three productions in New York, and is published by Playscripts. He has written reviews and feature stories about the entertainment world for The Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone, Parade, Dramatics, Reader’s Digest and dozens of other publications. His play “Maisie and Grover Go to the Theatre” is published by ArtAge. He has taught theatre classes at the 92ndSt. Y, at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, at HB Studio and other institutions, as well as in private coaching sessions. His “Test of Time” won the Best Documentary CableAce Award for Lifetime Television.
CARMEL CAR & LIMOUSINE SERVICE, in business since 1978, has been selected as the official transportation company for Intermission Talk. Its wide variety of services, including special theatre packages, and reservations, are available at carmellimo.com, the Carmel App, or at 212 – 666 – 6666.
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