An extravagant, eccentric eyeful, director Kate Whoriskey’s production of “The Rose Tattoo” is surely the first “Rose Tattoo” to unfold inside what appears to be a gigantic calla lily. Going by Tennessee Williams’ title, however, and the number of times the word “rose” is invoked onstage, it’s a lily with roselike aspirations.
At the Goodman Theatre, the interior scenes of Williams’ 1951 play — which is set in a Gulf Coast village heavy with Sicilian emigres and desires of the flesh — imagine Serafina delle Rose (Alyssa Bresnahan) as a resident of a red-hued fever dream. Derek McLane’s scenic design has the molto distressed heroine, a widowed seamstress hungry for love, sharing living quarters with her dressmaker’s mannequins in the confines of a Victrola-shaped cone of petals. When the sailor boy (Ian Brennan) courting Serafina’s 15-year-old daughter, Rosa (Meredith Zinner), comes ’round with an armful of flowers, he says to Serafina: “I hope you are partial to roses as much as I am.” You half-expect Mc-Lane’s scenery to nod in assent.
Last year Whoriskey and McLane collaborated on the Goodman’s “Drowning Crow,” a Southern-set spin on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Pretty and well-acted as it was, that project seemed more an elegant exercise rather than a transporting act of adaptation. More successfully, to my taste, Whoriskey’s team has exploded Williams’ play, never one of his best, into a dreamy, stylized-to-the-rafters experience. The stage floor is covered in rose petals; the palm trees are wrapped in clear plastic. The images — often wonderful, as in the opening kite-flying moment, and the final glimpse of the play’s unlikely lovers on a hill above Serafina’s tin-roof house — push “The Rose Tattoo” further into folk-myth territory than Williams imagined.
The tattoo belongs to the unseen husband of Serafina, a banana-truck driver and dope smuggler, who is killed early on. Serafina grieves for three years, lost in the memories of their seven-nights-a-week lovemaking. When young Rosa meets her sailor at a high school dance, Serafina’s obsessive parental control becomes no less extreme than, say, Piper Laurie’s in “Carrie.”
But love finds a way, for both Rosa and Serafina. Into the seamstress’ life comes another banana-truck driver, Alvaro (John Ortiz, whose comic touch recalls both Roberto Benigni and Cantinflas). From the neck down Alvaro is a dead ringer for Serafina’s late husband. Is this a sign from the Virgin Mary that she should jump him? The wobbly dramatic action is decked out with everything from an ominous witch-next-door (played here by Mike Nussbaum, costumed like a swinging-’60s Nosferatu) to a chorus of shrieking women who, at one point, attack an adulteress with a fervor that foreshadows the cannibals in Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
Whoriskey and her designers, along with choreographer Randy Duncan, take this tall tale deep into a realm more typical of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” than Williams.
The show is full of fluid, ritualized movement (the witch’s goat is played by actor/dancer Sean Blake), aestheticized violence — at one point we see the nude Rosa slitting her wrists in the tub, high above the stage floor — and, by hook and crook, a happy ending. It’s a magical-realism blowout.
The acting’s quite good throughout, though Whoriskey errs in allowing her ensemble to pitch everything at fever intensity. The exception is Bresnahan, an interestingly guarded and precisely spoken performer somewhat at odds with all the fake-Mediterranean blather. She works hard and carefully to modulate an essentially unmodulated character.
Ortiz screams his lungs out in his first scene, and it takes the audience a long time afterward to warm up to him. He’s enjoyable, though, once he loosens up.
A lot of good Chicago stagefolk do what they can in supporting roles, with flavorsome contributions from Mary Beth Fisher, Susan Hart, Elizabeth Laidlaw and, as a traveling salesman in a boater, Fred Zimmerman.
Williams once wrote that his play, which tried out in Chicago a half-century ago, was a “comic grotesque mass to the male force.” That description points to a certain whatzit quality. But those of us who might resist a relatively straightforward revival of “The Rose Tattoo” have a lot to chew on here. Bound to be controversial, the Goodman production is a bold reminder, in effect, to say it with flowers –whatever “it” really is.
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“The Rose Tattoo”
When: Through Feb. 15
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: 312-443-3800
