"Rose" Portrays a Life of Heartbreak, Humor and Survival

"Rose"

 

Written by Martin Sherman; lighting design by TEd Sullivan; sponsored by the Bank of America Celebrity Series and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

 

Starring Olympia Dukakis as Rose

Performances: Now through January 21 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
Box Office: 617-933-8600 or www.bostontheatrescene.org

 

There can be tremendous power in the simple act of speaKing Brilliantly crafted words. Olympia Dukakis demonstrates this superbly in her one-woman show, "Rose," running for one week only at the Boston Center for the Arts on Tremont Street. Seated on a bench center stage with script in hand for the entire performance, Ms. Dukakis exalts the magnificent prose of playwright Martin Sherman's epic monologue, taking us on a journey through one remarkable woman's joy, sorrow, pain, hope - and survival.

 

Dukakis' Rose begins her personal reverie while sitting shiva for a nine-year-old Middle Eastern girl who has died of a gunshot wound to the head. "The bullet caught her in the middle of her thought," says the Jewish woman with quietly chilling simplicity, her sadness and silent outrage alive in her eyes. For the next uninterrupted hour and 50 minutes, the audience is transfixed. Rose, and Olympia Dukakis, have cast their spell.

 

These united-as-one women take us from Rose's austere and impoverished childhood in a tiny village in the Ukraine to her very comfortable retirement in Florida. Along the way she paints a vivid picture of the girl who sought artistic and romantic freedom in Warsaw only to have the Russian occupation imprison her in the very ghetto that had once been her sanctuary. Later, as a refugee, she becomes part of the Exodus only to be thwarted by the British in her attempts to reach Palestine. A daring escape to America lands her among affluent Jews in Atlantic City, where she finds relative happiness by wedding a man named Sonny Rose. Years later, circumstances bring the now humorously named Rose Rose to a commune in Connecticut and finally to successful hotel ownership in Miami Beach.

 

Throughout the play, Dukakis illuminates Sherman's wonderfully descriptive narrative with the sense of other people being on stage with her. By conjuring them in her mind's eye, reaching out to touch them, or remembering their physical appearance and personality traits to the last poignant detail, she invests Rose's history with a depth of character that is at once comical and heartbreaking. She's not just telling her life's story. She's reliving it.

 

Woven into the tale are political and cultural markers that serve as milestones for Rose and the world around her. While raging wars, religious hatred, and divided generations catch Rose up in their swirling tides and dash her back down again, she nonetheless emerges a victor - a woman to whom God may be questionable but whose traditions, sense of humor, and knowledge of the past give her a strength and clarity of purpose that resonate with passion and conviction.

 

Dukakis' ability to move us with a pause or a glance is astonishing. Impish one minute, aching the next, she can be girlishly sensual when describing the first time she lost her breath making love, then teeter on the edge of emphysema when telling how kind American soldiers gave her that first cigarette. She can also express anger with the power of bombs dropping. In a final explosive torrent of emotion, Dukakis unleashes 80 years of built up rage that Rose has suppressed and channeled into the simple act of continuing to live. With all she's seen, and all she's survived, she can't understand how war and its atrocities are still commonplace.

 

"Rose" is a magnificent story of how the collision of one woman's life with world events separates her from those around her but also strengthens her to find joy in that separation. Rose is an extraordinary woman. And Olympia Dukakis' reading of her is an extraordinary performance.