New Play in Manhattan

The Rose Tattoo (by Tennessee Williams; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is laid, like most Tennessee Williams plays, in the South--in a village on the Gulf Coast. But its characters are rowdy Sicilian immigrants, and its tenor is life-loving and affirmative. Playwright Williams has cast off unnaturalism for primitivism, neurosis for fulfillment, the genteel nymphomaniac for the savage one-man woman. But though he has reversed his basic theme, introduced some livelier and trashier tunes, trilled a bit less and banged more, Williams has never seemed so blatantly himself.

The Rose Tattoo is about Serafina Delle Rose, whose husband--a lusty man with a rose tattooed on his chest--is killed smuggling narcotics on a banana truck. After his death, Serafina wildly exalts him into a legend, lives devotedly with his ashes, cuts off all outside life. Then, slowly and agonizingly, she is forced to recognize that her husband was unfaithful to her. Through another banana-truck driver, "with my husband's body and the face of a clown," she is brought back to life, and set free to love.

Williams began The Rose Tattoo in Rome, so carried away by Italian "vitality ... and love of life" that he jumped from one extreme to another. Perhaps the knowledge that he had been repeating himself counted for as much as the atmosphere of Rome. In any case, at both extremes he displays the same excess: the same romanticism, sensationalism, violence. Now he writes of a woman who, when baffled, shatters her household possessions instead of her sanity--a woman who has to be rescued from a mausoleum instead of sent to a madhouse.

Moreover, the play's tone, if affirmative at the end, is badly mixed before that. After building up a good deal of emotional intensity, Williams snaps the whole mood by turning Serafina's first meeting with the truck driver into low comedy.

The best of The Rose Tattoo is effective theater. David Diamond's incidental music is pleasant, and Boris Aronson's set appealing. Maureen Stapleton gives Serafina a crude, harsh vitality. But too often the play itself is lush, garish, operatic, decadently primitive, a salt breeze in a swamp, a Banana Truck Named Desire.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.