86 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
Tomei’s exceptionally physical performance in “The Rose Tattoo” verges on dance.
THE THEATRE
AMERICAN DREAMS
The pursuit of happiness in “The Rose Tattoo” and “Soft Power.”
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
“
M
y love-play to the world,” Ten-
nessee Williams called “The
Rose Tattoo,” which was first mounted
on Broadway in 1951—the production
made Maureen Stapleton a star—and
was later adapted into a film with an
Academy Award-winning performance
by the larger-than-life Anna Magnani.
Williams wrote the play in a swoon of
romantic gratitude for his great love, Frank
Merlo. Merlo, a Sicilian-American, first
entered Williams’s life as a conquest in
Provincetown; some years later, a chance
encounter on a Manhattan street brought
him back into it, more or less for good.
In his memoirs, Williams, “too long ac-
customed to transitory attachments,” re-
calls his initial reluctance to commit and
his subsequent realization that, with
Merlo, contentment could finally be his.
The next day, Williams tells us, he came
home to find “little Frankie” asleep “on
the huge bed,” the picture of cozy devo-
tion. Instant attraction, comic hazard, the
providential abundance of a happy home:
these are also themes in “The Rose Tat-
too,” now in a Roundabout Theatre Com-
pany revival, directed by Trip Cullman
(at the American Airlines).
But those aren’t the only themes. Wil-
liams—who, as a child, was smothered
by his grandiose mother and tormented
by his seething, frequently absent fa-
ther—revered, craved, and feared love.
Domestic joy was not a natural subject
for him. Before “The Rose Tattoo” reaches
toward ecstasy, it wallows in despair;
there is a wanton, operatic hysteria to
the play and to its heroine, Serafina delle
Rose, a Sicilian-immigrant seamstress
with the soul of a diva. Roses are every-
where—in Serafina’s name and the names
of her daughter, Rosa, and her husband,
Rosario, who combs rose oil into his hair
and bears the titular tattoo on his chest.
You can almost smell them, sweet, heavy,
and verging on rotten.
The delle Roses live in a Gulf town
that is imbued, according to Williams’s
production notes, with a gaudy, tropical
brightness. (Mark Wendland, the set de-
signer, has bordered the stage with sand
and loosed on it a flock of plastic flamin-
gos.) Rosario, whom we never see, drives
a banana truck, with “something extra”
hidden under his cargo—drugs, we gather.
This, along with the suspicious appear-
ance of a lanky blonde (Tina Benko),
should worry Serafina (Marisa Tomei),
but nothing seems to. Fervently devoted
to Rosario, she brims with pride and glad-
ness: she is pregnant, but, before she can
tell her husband the news, he crashes on
the road. This is the end of Rosario’s life,
and also, apparently, of Serafina’s. Three
years later, she is still deranged by mourn-
ing. (She lost the baby, too.) She barely
leaves the house, and, when she does, she
wears only a slip, like a tart, or a lunatic.
A gaggle of neighborhood women, fellow-
Sicilians, peck at her with glee. Worse,
Rosa (Ella Rubin), a beautiful, blooming
fifteen-year-old, is bitterly ashamed of
her mother. She’s in love with a fresh-
faced young sailor (Burke Swanson),
whom Serafina, having at last cottoned
on to Rosario’s infidelity, treats like a sea-
soned predator. In a spectacular act of
parental overreach, she makes the boy
kneel down and swear to the Virgin Mary
that he will respect her daughter’s inno-
cence. Then she goes back to wailing in
agony, and the kids skip off to a party,
like the Americans they are.
One way to see “The Rose Tattoo”
is as a reversal of “The Glass Menag-
erie”: instead of frigid, domineering
Amanda and obedient, recessive Laura,
we get a mother who shrinks from the
world and a daughter who runs toward
it. Amanda spins fantasies with words;
Serafina, caught between languages—
her mamma-mia English is studded
with Italian—fantasizes, too, but with
her flesh. Tomei, delicate and vital, does
