THE ROSE TATTOO
–Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo
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Serafina’s brush with madness is precipitated by the death of her husband, a truck driver named Rosario killed while smuggling for an Italian crime family. The unfaithful but beautiful Rosario–“Valentino with a mustache,” one character calls him–bore on his chest the tattoo of a rose, which magically transferred to Serafina’s breast one night as a sign that she’d conceived. But the shock of Rosario’s death causes her to miscarry, and she transfers all her maternal instincts to her 15-year-old daughter Rosa–“a twig off the old rosebush” who’s quickly blossoming into a desirable young woman, to Serafina’s dismay. While fretting over Rosa’s relationship with a hot-blooded young sailor named Jack Hunter, Serafina meets Alvaro Mangiacavallo–a young truck driver who has the same muscular, compact build as her late husband but “the face of a clown.” Athletic yet endearingly awkward, the feisty, impulsive Alvaro pursues Serafina in a turbulent courtship.
Director Kate Whoriskey embraces that quality in her production, which eschews traditional poetic naturalism in favor of a hallucinatory magic realism. Key scenes are played as ritual: a processional dance of mourning (choreographed by Randy Duncan), a martial-arts display in which Alvaro does battle with a black goat (dancer Sean Blake wearing horns), a wild attack by Serafina’s raven-haired Sicilian neighbors (Eileen Niccolai, Elizabeth Laidlaw, and Catherine Smitko) upon Rosario’s blond girlfriend (Cynthia Von Orthal) like Furies attacking an intruder, and the joyful climax, in which Serafina literally climbs a mountain to reach Alvaro, like Eurydice returning from the land of the dead.
The Rose Tattoo is less a nuanced psychological portrait than a poetic pageant, a ritual of death and rebirth populated by elemental, almost archetypal characters and suffused by both Catholic and pagan mysticism. The Goodman’s revival revels in this mythic quality, making a dynamic evening of theater out of Williams’s rich, indulgent celebration of sensuality and emotional excess.
