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The Martins take on Tennessee Williams
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Rose Tattoo
By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set by James Noone. Costumes by Michael Krass. Lighting by Kevin Adams. Sound by Jerry Yager. Music by Mark Bennett. With Andrea Martin, Dominic Fumusa, Gabe Goodman, Sophie Rich, Cheryl McMahon, Bobbie Steinbach, Courtney Abbiati, Greta Storace, Melinda Lopez, Tina Benko, Nancy E. Carroll, Diego Arciniegas, Timothy Crowe, Rachel Rusch, Dara Fisher, Colleen Quinlan, Ryan Sypek, and Chris Frontiero. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through June 13.
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Tennessee Williams called The Rose Tattoo "my love play to the world," and Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin has made it his love play to Andrea Martin, a talented actress more likely to be lumped with Robin Williams than with Tennessee. In the Tony-winning 1951 play, Martin, a veteran of SCTV and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, plays Serafina delle Rose, a Sicilian immigrant to a Gulf Coast community between New Orleans and Mobile. Devoutly Catholic, she is even more spiritually touched by sex with her husband, who is killed early in the play, his death shutting her down until a well-built, endearingly brazen truck driver turns up to make her hormones hum again. Doubtless, director Martin thought the mercurial heroine of Williams’s rarely revived play would allow the actress known for deft cartooning to flap her thespian wings. And Martin turns in a lovely performance, vulnerable, funny, and fierce, yet life-size, that wrests the play from the lust-for-life clutches of Anna Magnani, with whose performance in the 1955 film Serafina is most identified (though Maureen Stapleton originated the role). But The Rose Tattoo is a very odd duck, and the Martins do not succeed in making it a swan. Lacking the permanence of the much-belabored skin art of the title, the play is more a decal than a tattoo of Williams’s greatness. A folk comedy fraught with symbols and ethnic stereotype, it was the playwright’s attempt to harness the lusty innocence that had delighted him while traveling in Sicily with his long-time companion, Sicilian-American Frank Merlo. But the play is clunky in its conjuration of community — of a close-knit but taunting Italian enclave full of playing children, gossiping women, a resident witch, even a goat. And when it comes to symbols, the poor goat (white at the Huntington rather than black, as in the script, but genuine) had best get out of the way or be stampeded by all the others, from the ubiquitous roses, emblematic of both physical and spiritual passion, to lifeless dress dummies, stopped timepieces, religious icons, constricting undergarments, and truckloads of phallic bananas. (Two years later, the playwright would burst the awkward strictures of The Rose Tattoo and tote his bundle of metaphor to the Camino Real.) The play’s first act consists of six short scenes spanning three years, during which Serafina is hit first by the death of her perfect-lover husband and then by the news that she was not the only recipient of his perfect love. On top of that, the widow’s daughter, Rosa, blossoms into a girl graduating from high school and infatuated, much to her volcanic mom’s consternation, with a sailor. The play doesn’t spring to life until act two, which drops on the grieving and slovenly Serafina’s doorstep a banana-truck driver whose physique reminds her of her dead spouse’s. "My husband’s body," she laments, "with the head of a clown!" It’s easy to take The Rose Tattoo as a folk-comic assertion that sex conquers all, from the girdle to the Church, though Williams means the play to be as life- as lust-affirming. Still, its strongest scenes comprise the lyrical-grotesque love dance between the aroused but suspicious Serafina and Alvaro Mangiacavallo (whose appetite-heralding name means "eat a horse"), the opportunistic trucker who intrudes on the shrine of her widowhood. At the Huntington, Martin is joined on the floor by Dominic Fumusa, who is almost too big for James Noone’s revolving-cottage set and brings to Mangiacavallo a blunt, eager honesty that’s more charming than blockheaded. Greta Storace and Ryan Sypek are winning too as Serafina’s cloistered daughter, who wants to spread her sexual wings, and the sailor struggling against Nature to be a gent. Director Martin has a knack for revivals of large-cast American period pieces, as he notably displayed in Dead End. He tries to make The Rose Tattoo both broadly comic and delicate. But too often, particularly when the supernumeraries burst in, the play seems like an answer to the question, why does everyone revive The Glass Menagerie or Streetcar?
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