'The Rose Tattoo' roars, but far too silently

SUSIE CHO/YH Maria Oliveras, MC '01, shows Blake Edwards, SM '02, where he can stick that toothbrush.

The world of a play, Tennessee Williams states in his 1950 preface to The Rose Tattoo, should be a "world without time," a world in which we can confront the emotions that have been dull-ed in "the revolving wirecage of our nervous world." Set in a quaint Sicilian village somewhere along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, The Rose Tattoo seems Williams' answer to his own cry for the creation of such a world. He has populated his play with people that pride themselves on the fervor of their emotional expression, and has placed them in a South where the air, as always, stays thick with heat, noise, and sensual urgency.

The current production of The Rose Tattoo, directed by Brian Mullin, DC '01, faithfully recreates the plot and characters, if not the world, of Williams' imagination. The play opens with the pretty, plump Serafina delle Rose (Maria Oliveras, MC '01) waiting expectantly in her parlor. Back in Sicily, she was born a peasant's daughter, but her fine red blouse and her clean, modest home—which also doubles as her seamstress shop—show she has moved up in the world, or at least that she'd like everyone to think so. She carries with her the title of baronessa, a holdover from her husband's family in Sicily, where the title of baron was given to anyone who "owns a bit of land and a separate house for the goats."

Clinging to the social ladder of the old world, Serafina is unable to accept the changes in her station wrought by her move to the new world. In the United States, her husband is not a baron but the driver of a banana truck who smuggles goods for the local Mafia bosses. This reality, Serafina naïvely believes, will end at her wish. She can no more accept her own position than she can that of her daughter, Rosa (Julia Kots, TC '01), as a young girl coming of age in America. And as the play follows Serafina in her attempts to come to terms with the modern world, we find her degenerated, a raging, wild, lonely beast—the local freak show for the neighbors and a disgrace to her daughter—until the old world comes to reclaim her and she finds her hope renewed.

In Oliveras, Mullin has found perhaps the one person at Yale who can embody all aspects of the Serafina that Williams imagined. Oliveras not only has the figure and olive coloring Williams describes, but also the accent and stage presence her character demands. Oliveras' every move commands full attention, as her performance moves forward on a trip rocky with elation and despair. It is a moving and masterful performance, one that fully universalizes Serafina's stuggle to find her way in a new and hostile world.

Such perfect casting is not, however, without its repercussions. No matter how skillful the rest of the cast, they cannot reach the bar set by Oliveras. Adam O'Byrne, TC '01, makes a funny and utterly convincing turn as Jack, the sailor who falls in love with Rosa, and Blake Edwards, SM '02, is equally amusing as the salesman who finds Serafina at her most vulnerable and tries to make a sales pitch. But the major players in Serafina's life—David Blasher, DC '01, as Alvaro, a banana truck driver Serafina meets, and Kots' Rosa—fail to match Oliveras' intensity. While Blasher's sparring with Oliveras is both touching and intimate, his performance is at times more muddled and predatory than the character demands, and while Kots shows tenderness with O'Byrne, she is shrill and unsympathetic elsewhere.

The problem in this fine, effective production comes from miscasting. Kots, thin and blonde, looks and acts nothing like Oliveras' daughter. While she captures the innocent pre-pubescence of Rosa, she overplays her brattiness, displaying neither enough sympathy nor intensity. The same can be said of the other actresses—Erika MacDonald, SY '02, Emelie Gevalt, SY '03, and Mac Duncan, DC '01—who make delightful turns as Serafina's white Southern neighbors, but can't pass for the Sicilian women they also play. The actors' facility with their partially Italian text is admirable, but the lack of physical resemblance to the characters seriously hinders the believability of the play.

The set and lighting designers have worked impressively within the cramped Nick Chapel to create two worlds: the gaudy, Catholic shrine that is Serafina's home, and a forbidding outside world equipped with glaring sunlight and steep stairs that she cannot climb. Mullin's attempts to pare down the play for the space have proven less successful.

The production comes close to creating the atmospheric cacophony crucial to the play's success—Serafina's neighbors chatter wildly in Italian up and down the stairs, and the loudspeakers of the theater ring with the sounds of speeding trucks, marching bands, and Steven Holochwost's, CC '01, lyrical score. But as much noise as this production of The Rose Tattoo makes, it never gets loud enough.

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