At first glance, Marisa Tomei would not seem
to be an ideal candidate to play the lead in Tennessee Williams’ 1950 play, The Rose Tattoo. After all, the playwright’s state directions refer to Serafina
Delle Rose as “plump,” and the movie star, God bless her, is not yet at the
stage where her figure would charitably be labeled zaftig.
But in other ways, the role clung as well to her as
the clothes her widowed seamstress character knitted in the Roundabout Theatre Co. revival that closed last week at the American Airlines Theater. Like Serafina, Ms. Tomei is of
Sicilian ancestry (even if she is not a native of Italy), unlike the Broadway
originator of the role, Irish-American Maureen Stapleton. She is closer to the
character’s age, too, than Ms. Stapleton (54 vs. 24). Her screen roles
demonstrate her comfort in expressing this character’s erotic instincts. Most
of all, she can segue expertly between tragic and comic modes, as Williams
could write when inclined (which, more often than not, he wasn’t).
In a sense, it is surprising that Broadway had not
gotten around to reviving The Rose Tattoo much sooner. Not only did the
role of Serafina win Anna Magnani a Best Actress Oscar in 1955, but the play
itself won Williams a Best Play Tony Award.
Yet it took the Roundabout a while to stage it—as
the company’s ninth production of a Williams play, it had to wait its turn
behind The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, written when the
playwright was well into a creative and popular decline. It might not have made
it this time either, except that Tomei and director Trip Cullman had
proved that it remained a viable theatrical property with an acclaimed 2016
production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
The Rose Tattoo, you
see, may well be Williams’ most optimistic play. In Serafina’s hope for a
second chance of love after the sudden death of both her husband and the unborn
child she lost in shock afterward, the playwright gave dramatic life to his own
giddy new lease on life at the start of his relationship with Frank Merlo, who
became his most significant and long-lasting romantic partner.
The Italian-American Merlo also sparked the slightly
unusual milieu of this play. Like much of his work, it is set in the South, but
the drawling denizens of the region take a back seat this time to Sicilian immigrants on the Gulf Coast. The women of the community, headed by matriarch Assunta
(played by an affecting Carolyn Mignini), form a kind of chorus of deep concern
surrounding Serafina.
Even with ths different setting and character types,
Williams could not help returning to his traditional themes of illusion and constraint-overpowering
passion. But this time, a wounded female protagonist realizes that the first
must be rejected and the second welcomed in order for her to go on living.
Serafina’s desperate prayer to the statue of the
Madonna she keeps—“Oh, Lady, give me a sign!”—is answered in the most unlikely way: in the arrival on her doorstep
of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (a fine Emun Elliott), whose argument with a traveling
salesman has left him with torn clothes.
Agreeing to mend his company jacket, Serafina lends
him her late husband’s rose shirt. Glimpsing his finely muscled torso in the
sunlight for the first time, she can’t help gasping, “My husband's body,
with the head of a clown!”
This scene, as much as any other in the play, revealed
Tomei’s frankly physical approach to the role. She fairly staggered back at the
sight of Elliott’s torso, creating raucous laughter. She produced the same
effect in another scene in which Serafina struggles none too successfully to wiggle
out of her girdle.
The conflicts in Williams’ best-known plays are
normally battlefields of the mind, but Serafina, a Sicilian earth mother, wages
hers in the here and now: with neighbors who regard the widow as disorderly,
with a prospective new lover she is trying to understand, and with a teenage
daughter who provokes all her overprotective instincts.
Cullman masterfully used contributions from set designer
Mark Wendland to create this community swayed as much by sensuality as by
swaying coastal breezes. But his best work was drawing such a funny-sad,
vibrant performance from Tomei.
In the process, the actress not only made an
implicit argument for allowing future theatergoers to see Serafina more often
onstage, but also for her own return—hopefully soon—to Broadway.
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