Review: Marisa Tomei Braves a Typhoon in ‘The Rose Tattoo’

You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian-Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company’s untethered revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo” are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them.

But it’s nothing as palpable as a hurricane that keeps knocking them off balance and making them flail like sandpipers in a heavy wind. To understand what’s sweeping through this production, which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday with a cast led by a valiant Marisa Tomei, listen to the words of Assunta, a wise old Sicilian signora.

“There is something wild in the air,” says Assunta (Carolyn Mignini), in the play’s opening moments, to Serafina (Tomei), the ecstatically married wife of a virile truck driver. “No wind but everything is moving.” She adds that she can hear the noises of the stars.

A skeptical Serafina, who says she sees “nothing moving,” ascribes the noise to termites. But Trip Cullman, the imaginative but erratic director here, appears to have taken Assunta’s emotional weather report to heart.

Just look at Mark Wendland’s wide-open set (lushly lighted by Ben Stanton), which conjures a world without walls. Pieces of furniture, door frames, a sewing machine and a candle-laden shrine to the Virgin Mary seem to float against a video backdrop of waves lapping against a shore. (Lucy Mackinnon did the projection design). And huddled beneath the power lines that stretch above the stage is a thick congregation of pink flamingos.

The flamingos, which are artificial, remain immobile. But all the human performers do indeed seem to have been destabilized by a shelter-free environment in which the usual demarcations between inside and outside do not exist.

This approach makes a certain poetic sense in a play about the serendipitous and cataclysmic force of carnal love. First produced in 1951, when it (astonishingly) became the winner of Williams’s only Tony Award for Best Play, “The Rose Tattoo” is perhaps the most hopeful and lighthearted work in its author’s suffering-packed canon.

Dedicated to Williams’s longtime partner, Frank Merlo, a former sailor of Sicilian ancestry, “Tattoo” is a paean to the anarchic but restorative power of sexual attraction. It makes good on Blanche DuBois’s assertion in “A Streetcar Named Desire” that “sometimes there’s God, so quickly,” especially if that god is Eros.

The fable-like plot is built around the unlikely destruction and resurrection of Serafina the seamstress, a proper, corset-wearing wife and mother whose life is unhinged when the husband whom she worships — body and soul, but particularly body — dies in a truck crash. When she later learns that he had been unfaithful to her, she begins to question her very faith.

But fate has a wonderful surprise for Serafina: Alvaro Mangiacavallo (the Scottish-born actor Emun Elliott, in a likable Broadway debut), a lovely buffoon of man, who has her husband’s body and the head of a clown.

Williams wrote “Tattoo” with the great Italian actress Anna Magnani in mind, though he had to wait for the 1955 film version for her to play it. She was a volcanic presence, whose Vesuvian eruptions in the part had the transcendent conviction of Italian opera.

Tomei knows from Italian-flavored portraiture. (She won an Oscar playing a character named Mona Lisa Vito in “My Cousin Vinny.”) If, in the closefitting 1950s slips and dresses the costume designer Clint Ramos has provided, her affect is more cuddly pixie than temperamental colossus, she is nonetheless a bold and inventive comic performer.

Unfortunately, she is in hard-fought competition with her environment. It’s not that she’s operating in a vacuum, which might be easier. Cullman has populated the stage with an ever-present chorus of singing Italian women and frantic children.

These are not, to be fair, interpolations. Neither is the use of the mood-setting Italian ballads, though they have been omitted from other productions I’ve seen. (Fitz Patton and Jason Michael Webb did the original music.) Cullman is acting on suggestions from Williams’s original script.

I’m also assuming that the intention has been to conjure a small town in which nobody’s business is their own, and the lines between private and public are hazy. Still, the lack of defined interiors can lead to unwarranted confusion.

From the beginning of this production, which originated at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Tomei must pitch her performance at an exaggerated level to be seen. Fluttery and anxious from the get-go, she doesn’t establish a whole lot of difference between Serafina before and after her husband’s death, which is mostly signaled by a change in hair style.

Worse, once the studly but hapless Mangiacavallo (the name means “eat a horse”) makes his entrance, he and Serafina seem to be communicating across an abyss on that big, borderless stage. They are both given to frantic, pantomime-style gesticulation and shticky molto Italiano accents.

When, at one point, she responds to him as if they were playing charades, it feels uneasily like a commentary on the acting. Both Tomei and Elliott have some genuinely funny moments. But it’s a vaudevillian notion of sex they’re presenting, and the poignancy and poetry within their characters’ coming together are mostly absent.

The large cast also includes the formidable Tina Benko as a husband-stealing casino worker and Paige Gilbert and Portia as man-crazy, gossipy clients of Serafina. Ella Rubin is Serafina’s defiant (and stridently Southern) daughter, and Burke Swanson is the young, wooden sailor she loves.

Though the original film version was advertised with words like “frank” and “violent,” “Tattoo” can indeed be interpreted as a romantic comedy. But as in all of this dramatist’s works, there are delicate feelings at its center, and they need to be handled with care.

Feeling betrayed by her beloved Virgin, Serafina exclaims to the effigy in her living room (or I think that’s where it is), “You hold in the cup of your hand this little house and you smash it.” Allowing for Serafina’s tendency to hyperbole, she might be talking about the production in which she appears.

The Rose Tattoo

Tickets Through Dec. 8 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

The Rose Tattoo

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Ben Brantley is the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times. He has been a staff critic since 1996, filing reviews regularly from London as well as New York. Before joining The Times in 1993, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

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