THE ROSE TATTOO

In "The Rose Tattoo", Tennessee Williams created not so much a play as a spoken comic opera. It's a work to be relished for its arias and the grand emotions they represent, rather than for its believability or the efficiency of its storytelling. The similarities between the play and opera are heightened by Williams's extensive use of Italian in this tale of Serafina, an inconsolable Sicilian-American widow who finds consolation with a man whose magnificent body is topped off, as she complains, by "the head of a clown." But the buffoon in this opera bouffe doesn't even appear until the middle of the second act. Until then, the play is just a series of set pieces loosely connected by their occurrence in or near Serafina's home and dress shop. No wonder The Goodman Theatre's production omits the intermission between Acts I and II -- given the chance, at least a third of the audience would have decamped before the piece even got rolling. As it is, things move slowly enough to make one wish director Kate Whoriskey and dramaturg Tom Creamer had gone through those acts with a more vigorous blue pencil. But Whoriskey's stage sense is sharper than her text sense, and long before intermission she manages to sweep the audience up in the play's atmosphere-one of melodrama so over-drawn and over-ripe it turns hilarious. Or maybe it would be truer to say that the sweeping-up gets done by the extraordinary Alyssa Bresnahan, a coloratura of the spoken word whose Serafina is a force of nature somewhere between whirlwind and tornado. Maybe Derek McLane's set is draped in parachute silk to reflect the other characters' need for a safe landing after this Serafina sends them shooting aloft. (Those rose-colored drapes, billowing out toward the audience, don't waste any time looking like a rose resembling female genitalia-they go directly to the gynecologist's-eye view.)

Whether you enjoy "The Rose Tattoo", then, depends: if you're in a hurry, or in the mood for naturalistic drama, you'll be ready to jump out of your skin by the second time Serafina implores her dime-store Virgin Mary for "a sign." But if you can surrender to the symbol-laden grand-operatic world Williams created-a world in which a husband's tattoo appears on his wife as a sign that she's conceived a son; in which the husband is resurrected; in which their daughter (charmingly portrayed by Meredith Zinner) falls in love with a sailor (the appealing Ian Brennan) who not only preserves her virginity but turns out to be a virgin himself -- you'll have a ball. Whoriskey falters occasionally, as when she dresses Sean Blake in a loin-cloth and horns and makes him dance around the stage as the goat who invades Serafina's garden. There are times when that movement-based storytelling (of which Mary Zimmerman is the best-known exponent) works, but here it just looks ridiculous. Generally, though, the director's choices are dead-on, and she's cast even the smallest roles with veterans who know how to overplay in the service of the text without mugging or indicating. Greg Vinkler is especially delightful as Serafina's priest, struggling to counsel her while averting his eyes from her grief-inspired deshabille. "Don't tell me -- oh, my goodness-that is an undergarment!" he cries, and Vinkler's facility is such that he doesn't have to wring his hands-his voice does it for him.

If you're expecting a stereotyped 'Tennessee Williams play,' this one will disappoint you. But if for Valentine's Day you're open to noticing how at a certain point-say, three octaves above middle C--the pain of lost love turns to comedy, The Rose Tattoo will reward your attention.