The Rose Tattoo, now co-starring Marisa Tomei and a colony of plastic flamingos, is a comedy, a genre the Roundabout revival insists on so blatantly it might as well have hired a skywriter. Tennessee Williams, after writing The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke, plays that repel happy endings like so many rare earth magnets, spent a restorative year in Sicily with his lover and conceived a work that would explore, he wrote, “the triumph of vitality under deadening influence”.
Comedy never came to Williams easily or unalloyed. If his earlier plays are flecked with jokes, those jokes are situated in character. The laughter they invite is in the Chekhovian mode – it holds back tears. The Rose Tattoo’s humor is more aggressive, shredding Kleenex and turning it into confetti. Every time the play tries to slump into tragedy, Williams shoves it back toward sex farce, making hay with a tight girdle, dropped condoms, an attempted rape. A burlesque of desire, directed by Trip Cullman with desperate energy and garbled sense of time and place, it has the buoyancy of a leaky balloon that makes rude noises as it deflates. There’s vitality here, but nothing that feels like triumph.
Tomei stars as Serafina delle Rose, a lusty Sicilian immigrant, now settled on Florida’s Gulf coast and devoted to her truck-driving husband, Rosario. When Rosario is killed, she grieves, hysterically and in dishabille, for three years. Finally, the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, the sexual awakening of her teenage daughter (Ella Rubin) and the mysterious arrival of another Sicilian truck driver, Alvaro (Emun Elliott), sad-sack body double for the lost Rosario, yanks her back to life.
Williams styled the play like a folk comedy and if it is loving toward its characters, it also indulges in outrageous stereotypes, equating foreignness with primitivism and hyper-emotionalism. Of course, it’s hard to get too exercised at a play that never seems to take its one world seriously, strewing its beach with a witch, a goat, a sailor, screaming children and a chorus of imported peasant women, clad in stylish widow’s weeds. (This production can’t decide if those women are friends are foes, it can’t decide a lot of things.)
In many of Williams’s plays, female desire appears as unnatural, often terrifying, a catalyst for tragedy or just the cherry straddling the top – think of Blanche and her boys, Alma throwing herself at the salesman, Maggie’s desperate attempts at seduction, Lady’s panting after Val. The Rose Tattoo keeps insisting that Serafina’s lust, requited by Alvaro, is a joke, a hilarious one, with Tomei and Elliott pantomiming horniness like they’re stuck in a charades game that only works blue.
Past productions have starred actors with a heft of gravitas – Anna Magnani, Mercedes Ruehl, Maureen Stapleton – women who may have given the gags somewhere weightier to land. Tomei is a lighter, flightier presence – sensuous and delightful – and she plays even the darkest moments brightly, in on the joke. She and Elliott have great fun together, but they don’t sell sex as life-affirming. It looks effortful and cheap. The whole cast screams and flails and races around Mark Wendland’s set, which scrambles any sense of indoors and outdoors in something like an orgasmic frenzy. The plastic flamingos look on, unmoved.
