Tennessee Williams told stories about forced migration: Blanche DuBois finds her way to New Orleans only after she’s evicted from “Belle Reve”, Brick is forced into heterosexuality by societal constraints and Maggie “the Cat”’s libido, and Baby Doll has adulthood thrust onto her when she finds herself at the center of a perverse romantic triangle. A streetcar named displacement? In The Rose Tattoo - being revived at the Williamstown Theatre Festival - Williams played with the concept in a more straightforward way, as he centers his attention on Serafina Delle Rose (Marisa Tomei), a Sicilian widow who finds herself feeling lost in a Gulf Coast town where she sticks out like a sore thumb. The death of her cheating husband has left her to fend for herself while trying to raise a teenager daughter, Rosa (Gus Birney) who doesn’t understand her mother’s Old World traditions. Serafina constantly speaks of her dead husband’s prominent rose tattoo, but it’s clear all along she’s been inked with an emblem even harder to conceal: Sicily.
By the early 20th century over 100 thousand Sicilians had made their way from Europe to America, where they settled in places like New York, Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans. It’s there where Williams might have first been inspired to create Serafina, a woman whose exotic qualities both attracted and repelled him. One can imagine Williams being haunted by the contradicting feelings inside him, and finally finding solace in the motion pictures where he met Italian actress Anna Magnani. He wrote the part of Serafina with the larger-than-life actress in mind, and even though she wouldn’t get to play it until the 1955 film adaptation (for which she won the Best Actress Oscar), the role is pure Magnani, which makes it a challenge for other actresses to make their own.
In a way, Williams did to his Serafina what the character does to Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Christopher Abbott) a truck driver who reminds her so much of her husband, that he feels compelled to get himself a rose tattoo in order to attempt a seduction. Serafina can only love what she already loved. Therefore Ms. Tomei’s performance brims with Magnani-isms, she’s loud, crass and exists blissfully unaware of her sex appeal. But the actress is much too sensitive to settle for impersonation; rather she looks at Williams in the eye and masters his game, her Serafina is a pastiche made of spot-on Tomei choices, and bits and pieces that remind one of characters played by Sophia Loren, Penélope Cruz, and Sonia Braga. It’s a perfect performance in a show that fails her.
Director Trip Cullman also attempts to make his own mash-up, this isn’t Tennessee for purists, but Williams by way of Fellini, Almodóvar, Maury Yeston (Lindsay Mendez is given clumsy musical numbers that are nothing if not a Saraghina audition) and strangely enough John Waters. But where Ms. Tomei masters the art of the homage, Mr. Cullman makes the show feel as if his multicultural piñata burst before we arrived to the party.
Sadly this takes away from Ms. Tomei’s modulated, beautiful work and creates a tension not dissimilar to the conflict between Serafina and her daughter. The former is living in a necrophilia farce, the latter in her own Peyton Place-esque Technicolor drama complete with a blond sailor named Jack (Will Pullen). Except the director can’t control the outcome, Mr. Cullman fails to understand that America might be a land of opportunity and reinvention, but in Tennessee Williams-land the best you can hope for is to depend on kind strangers who allow you to make it out alive without being dragged away to a mental institution.
