Alive, Fresh and Imaginative, A New ‘Tattoo’

Trip Cullman’s production of “The Rose Tattoo” at Williamstown Theatre Festival is a triumph of visual, aural and dramatic reimagining of this singular play by Tennessee Williams. It is also a triumph for Marisa Tomei and the cast that supports her.

Set on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in an enclave of Sicilian immigrants, the play is in some ways a simple story told in the blunt, melodramatic language of Italian verismo opera. Serafina Delle Rose (Tomei), a seamstress, is married to Rosario, a banana truck driver who also delivers the drugs stowed under his seat. After he is killed in a fiery road accident while trying to outrun the police, Serafina loses her unborn child and becomes a homebound widow living with exaggerated memories of sexual passion and trying to protect her daughter, Rosa (Gus Birney), from the same urges. 

When another truck driver comes along three years later, she first resists then falls for Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Christopher Abbott), the “grandson of the village idiot” in Sicily and finally gives in to his persistent, bumbling wooing. Healed by the new sexual relationship, she is reawakened to the world, lets her daughter go and again feels life in her body.

Williams embedded his story in a Sicilian-American community trying to assimilate but caught between new and old ways. A group of women dressed in black act as a murmuring chorus led by Assunta (Barbara Rosenblatt), who predicts the future. There is even a strega (witch) with a goat and an “evil eye.” The original script, which Cullman has pared, had 24 speaking roles. 

Scenic Designer Mark Wendland has given Cullman a set that combines realism — actual telephone and power poles on either side of the stage, a tall, skinny-trunked palm tree soaring into the fly-space, sand lying outside Serafina’s beach house that is reached by a boardwalk bisecting the orchestra seats — with symbolism and mystery — a projection of the Gulf rolling in lies across the back of the stage behind nearly 200 pink plastic flamingos, the house sits on a platform raked from right to left and  the interior door, window, even the armoire where Serafina keeps Rosario’s ashes tilt inward.

Then there is the music. Perhaps the most surprising addition to the play is a folksinger (Lindsay Mendez), who delivers authentic Sicilian songs, selected by Michael Friedman, some bright, some darker, all bewitching, in an engaging, powerful voice and with an amused detachment that suggests how obvious and powerful human needs are. (Cullman felt comfortable adding the music since Williams included specific sound cues in the script: a goat’s bleat, children’s screams, even trucks passing by on the highway.)

Onstage, this “Tattoo” belongs to Tomei and, to a lesser extent, Abbott. Tomei simply becomes Serafina, the young sex-starved widow in an unwashed silk slip. She moves seamlessly between melodrama, comedy and true pathos while conveying a sensuality that begs for relief. Abbott is the embodiment of a buffoon (“My grandfather, the village idiot, tripped and fell on my grandmother, so here I am.”) and a man determined to end his virginity in Serafina’s bed. He is sweet and winning, even while compelled by his impulses.

Cullman has found a way to make “Tattoo” fresh and to bring out the greatness of its imaginative power, to strip it of the darkness of past productions and of the famous movie. It is a directorial tour-de-force that few could match.