E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tattoo parley Andrea Martin smells a rose BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

These days, Andrea Martin wears rose-pattern clothes all the time. She’s even bought rose perfume. After all, Serafina delle Rose, the uninhibited heroine of Tennessee Williams’s 1951 play The Rose Tattoo, is superstitious, and the feeling appears to have rubbed off. But for Martin, preparing to play Serafina in the Huntington Theatre Company production that opens next Friday has actually been a strategic enterprise that’s involved several years and thousands of miles.

Her long-time friend and collaborator and the Huntington’s artistic director, Nicholas Martin, suggested the role in the mid 1990s when she was spending increasing time away from film and television roles to work on stage. Then last summer, she traveled with her son to Sicily. They went to celebrate his recent graduation from college, but for her it was also an opportunity to explore the universe of Serafina, an immigrant living in Louisiana. Armed with a small recorder, Martin taped her conversations with Sicilian women and used those to nail Serafina’s accent. She also collected sundry other tips. "I certainly came back with how men are really different in Italy, in Sicily. They really are! Forward and, uh, macho and not at all nervous or timid, and I guess they feel it’s their right to make advances to women. And I think many women must melt at it. So that was great, and I recorded a lot of voices. Every woman I met, I had my little recorder, and I’d say, ‘Would you talk?’ And we talked. Yeah, I got some pointers."

Set in the 1950s in the Sicilian enclave of a Gulf Coast city, Williams’s play centers on a seamstress. Serafina is a devout Catholic, but physical love is more spiritual for her than religion. Her passion in the marriage bed is intense, as is her mourning when, early on, her husband is shot and she learns of his unfaithfulness. Then a happy-go-lucky truck driver pulls her from the pits of sorrow and rekindles her spiritual fires. Soon the emotional flames are leaping.

Upon seeing the play in 1954, theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote: "The virtuosity of the writing, alternately ribald and pathetic, is tremendous. Does it alternate between tragedy and farce? That is because it was meant for a great actress whose gift it is to switch emotional gear, change from a Siddons-esque pose to a bout of nose-picking without a moment’s hesitation."

Even if you missed Martin’s Elliot Norton Award–winning Huntington appearance as the explosive, slightly deranged landlady of Betty’s Summer Vacation, you’d need only a few moments in her bubbly company to confirm that she’s not capable of hesitation. "The role is actually a good fit for me in terms of emotional movement. I think part of it is from being Armenian and coming from a hot-blooded background, and also I think it’s my own [acting] background [it includes eight years on Second City TV], which has been very presentational. So to feel comfort in that kind of external display and then to have the actual historical memory of being Armenian helps me become introverted and understand the pain also."

Martin adds that Serafina’s mood swings flow with an organic ease that she attributes to the relaxed atmosphere Nicholas Martin creates for actors. "Some moments are more dramatic and heart-wrenching, and others are more comedic and vaudevillean, but for me there’s a fluidity — a beautiful word for Williams, and for being Sicilian. Williams doesn’t allow you not to be in the moment — there aren’t enough pauses for it! The whole play, if you’re not in the moment, you’re not really an Italian, Sicilian character. They’re in the moment, they are in life."

The Rose Tattoo is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue in Boston, May 14 through June 13. Tickets are $14 to $64; call 617-266-0800