The Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis currently performs a play about a community of Sicilian immigrants on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. If that does not sound like the usual Tennessee Williams’ assortment of Southern white nouveau riche or formerly rich that usually inhabit his plays, it is not.
But The Rose Tattoo belongs in the Festival because it is a play by Tennessee Williams, written around 1950 at what some consider the peak of his career. Several items identify it as his. Williams had a great fondness for Italy. When the pressures of New York and New Orleans and Key West and Los Angeles became too much, he headed for Rome, where he found great restorative properties in the people and the culture. The great love of Williams’ life, Frank Merlo, was from a Sicilian family, and the play was a gift to Merlo. And The Rose Tattoo, like just about all of Williams’ plays and about his own life, is about the conflict between Puritanical repression and the free celebration of life, both often expressed in ways of dealing with sex.
The Rose Tattoo takes an unusual approach to the subject. Both repression and celebration are embodied in the central character of the play, Serafina Delle Rose. Serafina has a seamstress shop in her home, and her clothes are very popular. But her life rotates around her husband, Rosario Delle Rose, good looking, powerful build, great lover, devoted to her. Rosario smuggles drugs for the mafia under the guise of delivering bananas.
When Rosario meets the frequent fate of drug smugglers, Serafina is devastated. She has a miscarriage and, over the objections of Father De Leo, has Rosario cremated and keeps his ashes in a marble urn. Disheveled, she never leaves the house. When her teen-age daughter Rosa likes a boy she met at a dance, Serafina tries to keep her at home too, until a concerned teacher intercedes.
In the tight-knit community, gossip spreads about Rosario’s affair with a card dealer at a nearby casino. Serafina refuses to believe it.
When an honest banana truck driver pulls up, arguing with another driver, Serafina observes that he has the body of her husband, though he has the face of a clown. That is enough to revive Serafina’s slumbering desires for human companionship. Alvaro may sometimes be a clumsy clown, but he has that body, and his own needs and desires.
Producer Carrie Houk and director David Kaplan elected to stage the Festival’s production of The Rose Tattoo in Circus Flora’s Big Top, hoping by introducing circus elements to capture the rich life of Sicilian communities and something of the free spirit and fantasy of Fellini, with Serafina sometimes living in her own dream world. I would have liked even more of that celebratory spirit to have taken hold of the cast. Two acrobats suspended on a ring become Rosa and her boyfriend as they celebrate their connection, a lovely image, though I thought it distorted the rhythms of the final scene.
I’m not quite sure what set designer James Wolk intended with the open wooden frames that moved about to mark Serafina’s house and perhaps other facades in the village, nor was the design on the upstage flat very clear. Michele Friedman Siler’s costumes helped to define the characters and their relationships, with wigs designed by Abby Pastorello. Jesse Alford’s lights and Nick Hime’s sound enrich the theatrical quality of the piece. Gwynneth Rausch managed props, and the aerial work was by On the Fly Productions.
Rayme Cornell leads the very strong cast as Serafina. Bradley Tejeda makes Alvaro a lovable doofus. Valentina Silva delights as daughter Rosa, with Oliver Bacus as her sweet, considerate boyfriend. Rachel Fox is the Other Woman. The prying women of the village include Holly Maffitt as the Strega, the witch with the goat and the evil eye; Carmen Garcia as Assunta; and Julia Crump and Tyler White as party girls grabbing a blouse from Serafina’s shop on their way to a parade in New Orleans. Mitchell-Henry Eagles doubles as a salesman and a doctor, Harry Weber plays the schoolteacher and the priest and sometimes appears in what may be a ringmaster’s outfit though without mastering a ring, and Tony Viviano splendidly provides the obligatory Italian serenade.
Though it has had multiple Broadway productions and a movie, The Rose Tattoo is not I think one of Williams’ most popular plays. I wish the Festival had done more with the circus concept. But I discovered more in the play than I remembered.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo by Suzy Gorman
