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[Theater reviews]

Second-act Rose
A survivor holds forth at New Rep

BY CAROLYN CLAY

Rose
By Martin Sherman. Directed by Adam Zahler. Set design by Joseph Pew. Costumes by Frances McSherry. Lighting by Tayva Pew. With Lucille Patton. At New Repertory Theatre through December 16 and at the Orpheum Foxborough January 18 through 27.

The heroine of Martin Sherman’s Rose never leaves the wooden bench where she’s sitting shivah. Yet her story takes us across a couple of oceans and most of the last century. Born in a Ukrainian shtetl in 1920, Warsaw Ghetto survivor Rose has covered a lot of ground, both historical and emotional, on her way to a millennial Miami Beach dotage that, at least at New Repertory Theatre in Newton, finds her still chic, still wry, and still impassioned. That her story comes piercingly full circle gives it both political and theatrical impact. But there are some longueurs along the circumference.

Playwright Sherman, an American who has lived in England for two decades, is best known for Bent, his affecting 1979 play depicting homosexual love in the shadow of Nazi persecution. The one-woman Rose, a 1999 hit in London (though somewhat less successful in New York) with Olympia Dukakis, is more concerned with the Jewish experience of 20th-century events. The play is seen here in its New England premiere, in a spare, subtly lit production directed by Adam Zahler and featuring Broadway veteran Lucille Patton, who combines a flinty, slightly loopy character with deeply felt emotion but could be earthier and surer of her lines.

Looking every inch the elegant, elder Jewish matron, Patton’s Rose begins her epic story with an abrupt shard of memory. " She laughed, blew her nose, and then a bullet struck her forehead in the middle of a thought, " she says in clipped, accented English, apparently referring to the young daughter she lost in the Ghetto uprising. Such indelible images occupy a stuffed brainpan, along with the loose change of a life that has taken 80-year-old Rose from a tiny Ukrainian-Jewish village to hotel proprietorship on Miami’s South Beach, that one-time Jewish retirement haven now full of " gymnasium bodies and a drug called Ecstasy. " It’s been a hell of a life, shaped by influences as disparate as history and bald-chested men, albeit more engaging as recounted in Rose’s more specific second act.

The first, however harrowing its already well-documented events, from the deprivation and killing of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the aborted 1947 journey of the ship Exodus to what was then Palestine, is overlong and more generic. (The speaker herself acknowledges that some of her memories may be cribbed from newsreels and Fiddler on the Roof.) Yet Rose does put a coat of personal paint on history, conveying, for example, the surprise of her young, bohemian circle at being herded into the Ghetto. Suddenly, she tells us incredulously, there was half a chicken to feed 12 people, when two weeks ago all had been cherry vodka and chocolate cake.

It’s after the Exodus fiasco that Rose hops a boat — or, more specifically, an American sailor — to Atlantic City (which she dubs " Warsaw by the Sea " ). There she and her second husband (alliance with whom has saddled her with the moniker Rose Rose) inherit a beach-chair concession before she gets into the residential-hotel business. Rose’s old-to-new-country tale, however, is as quirky as it is emblematic, a story of going with the flow of opportunity without ever escaping the sad undertow of the past or the moral mantle of Judaism.

Not that Rose is particularly religious; God, for her, is one more question to be weighed on the great Jewish scale of " on the other hand. " Indeed, some of the story’s best bits stem from a sort of kabalistic mysticism, particularly an episode in which a still-young Rose is inspired by The Dybbuk to summon into her body the spirit of her first husband. This mission involves cooking up a potion of her second spouse’s semen mixed with chicken necks, olive oil, and cloves and leads to a comic/poetic epiphany at a 1950s Miss America parade down the Atlantic City boardwalk. It also speaks to a deep sense of loss at the heart of this enterprising woman, for whom sitting shivah is a " meaningless " but too familiar gesture.

It is when Rose’s surviving child, the all-American Abner, is inspired by Israeli guests at the Double Rose Hotel to emigrate to the Promised Land that Rose takes the turn that brings it to an eerily timely conclusion. As we come to understand just why Rose is sitting shivah, the suffering of two peoples, and the two ends of one lifetime, are powerfully overlaid. And here Patton, if a bit too haute for the gutsy Rose, truly blooms.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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