What do you think?
Rate this book
The Rose Tattoo / by Tennessee Williams
A tender idyll about a Sicilian woman who must get over the death of her husband. "Forget the unevenness of the story," said Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, it's "an original and imaginative play."
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
50 people are currently reading
2333 people want to read
About the author
Tennessee Williams
754 books3,690 followersThomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
From Wikipedia
Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
From Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
October 2, 2016
I have this thing about Tennessee. I had read all of his plays (and a few of his biographies as well). I suppose it could be said that somewhere along the way I just fell in love with his style of writing. He is, possibly, one of my favourite playwrights of all time and surely my favourite when it comes to American dramatists. There is something in me that resonates with his preferred subjects of isolation, love, despair and loneliness. Moreover, there is something quite magical about the way he employs words. His plays are incredibly poetic and lyrical. This play is no exception. Perhaps it could be said that he used dreamy words to create a safe haven where his overly fragile heroines can truly shine. He shows us a world within a world, he takes us into a journey into the human soul and I love him for it.
The Rose Tattoo is a hidden gem. It may not be one of his best known works, but it is a great play. Beautifully written (has ever a playwright been more lyrical?) and profoundly touching. Its exploration of daughter and mother relationship, is just as ingenious and skilful as the one in the better know The Glass Menagerie. As is often the case with Williams, it is a female character that is in the centre of the play. This time the tragic heroine is Serafina Delle Rose. Serafina is portrayed tenderly but with great precious. Serafina, is shown to us, as a woman, as a human being with faults and virtues. Like Blanche from Streetcar she has her shortcomings and the way she behaves is sometimes quite absurd. Nevertheless, Serafina, like Blanche, possesses a great inner strength. Is Serafina a strong woman? That she certainly is. She doesn't give up easily, she defends her choices with all she has got and in the process takes us on a road of soul-searching with her.
The play opens with Serafina sitting on the sofa waiting for her husband Rosario's return. Serafina is a Sicilian women living in USA. She absolutely worships her husband and makes him the very purpose of her life. She makes a religion out of her love, as her adoration of her husband is enforced by her Roman-Catholicism. Having found a complete physical, emotional and spiritual fulfilment in her relationship, it could be said that she is perfectly content. Well, it's not a drama if two people fall in a love, get married and live happily ever after, is it? I don’t think it is a spoiler if I let you know that Serafina’s marriage isn’t as perfect as she believes it to be. She might utterly and absolutely adore her husband, but does he feel the same? This play raises many interesting questions about love and explores this subject from different points of view. What is love? Is romantic love an end in itself? What is parental love about? Is romantic love a kind of religion? What is the link between body and soul? Can love go on forever? Is love eternal? Can love between two human beings ever be perfect? The Rose Tattoo is a play that bravely and bodly explores a great number of themes: love, sexuality, loneliness, motherhood etc...
The majority of characters in this play are Sicilians. I think that T.W. once said that Italians were his kind of people. Perhaps there was something in their tempter that reminded him of Southern Americans and their French influenced ways. I would say that the writer does manages to capture something of Sicilian culture in this one. Williams doesn't stereotype Sicilians, nor does he turn them into a caricatures, which is obviously, a good thing. Another thing that deserves to be mentioned is the complex characterization. Serafina and her daughter are the main characters of this play. Similarly, to The Glass Menagerie, their portrayal is often highlighted with by contrasting them one to another. There is a clash of generations but also of desires, as Serafina’s daughter grows up she wants a life (and love) of her own. Serafina loves her daughter, but haunted by the tragedy of her lost love, she struggles to connected to her daughter, the very product of that love that consumes her so. Loneliness and isolation are something that can be felt in this play. I admire the way that cultures clash in Williams’ plays, he has a unique gift for portraying that. The cultural distance created in his plays often deepens that sense of loneliness and this play is no exception. Serafina belong to another culture, she is an Italian immigrant, isolated and alone, trying to make sense of the world she finds herself in. In Williams’ play it is often the clash between the South and the West of USA that creates trouble and tension, so in that sense this play is only slightly different.
A must read for all fans of Tennessee Williams!
The Rose Tattoo is a hidden gem. It may not be one of his best known works, but it is a great play. Beautifully written (has ever a playwright been more lyrical?) and profoundly touching. Its exploration of daughter and mother relationship, is just as ingenious and skilful as the one in the better know The Glass Menagerie. As is often the case with Williams, it is a female character that is in the centre of the play. This time the tragic heroine is Serafina Delle Rose. Serafina is portrayed tenderly but with great precious. Serafina, is shown to us, as a woman, as a human being with faults and virtues. Like Blanche from Streetcar she has her shortcomings and the way she behaves is sometimes quite absurd. Nevertheless, Serafina, like Blanche, possesses a great inner strength. Is Serafina a strong woman? That she certainly is. She doesn't give up easily, she defends her choices with all she has got and in the process takes us on a road of soul-searching with her.
The play opens with Serafina sitting on the sofa waiting for her husband Rosario's return. Serafina is a Sicilian women living in USA. She absolutely worships her husband and makes him the very purpose of her life. She makes a religion out of her love, as her adoration of her husband is enforced by her Roman-Catholicism. Having found a complete physical, emotional and spiritual fulfilment in her relationship, it could be said that she is perfectly content. Well, it's not a drama if two people fall in a love, get married and live happily ever after, is it? I don’t think it is a spoiler if I let you know that Serafina’s marriage isn’t as perfect as she believes it to be. She might utterly and absolutely adore her husband, but does he feel the same? This play raises many interesting questions about love and explores this subject from different points of view. What is love? Is romantic love an end in itself? What is parental love about? Is romantic love a kind of religion? What is the link between body and soul? Can love go on forever? Is love eternal? Can love between two human beings ever be perfect? The Rose Tattoo is a play that bravely and bodly explores a great number of themes: love, sexuality, loneliness, motherhood etc...
The majority of characters in this play are Sicilians. I think that T.W. once said that Italians were his kind of people. Perhaps there was something in their tempter that reminded him of Southern Americans and their French influenced ways. I would say that the writer does manages to capture something of Sicilian culture in this one. Williams doesn't stereotype Sicilians, nor does he turn them into a caricatures, which is obviously, a good thing. Another thing that deserves to be mentioned is the complex characterization. Serafina and her daughter are the main characters of this play. Similarly, to The Glass Menagerie, their portrayal is often highlighted with by contrasting them one to another. There is a clash of generations but also of desires, as Serafina’s daughter grows up she wants a life (and love) of her own. Serafina loves her daughter, but haunted by the tragedy of her lost love, she struggles to connected to her daughter, the very product of that love that consumes her so. Loneliness and isolation are something that can be felt in this play. I admire the way that cultures clash in Williams’ plays, he has a unique gift for portraying that. The cultural distance created in his plays often deepens that sense of loneliness and this play is no exception. Serafina belong to another culture, she is an Italian immigrant, isolated and alone, trying to make sense of the world she finds herself in. In Williams’ play it is often the clash between the South and the West of USA that creates trouble and tension, so in that sense this play is only slightly different.
A must read for all fans of Tennessee Williams!
August 3, 2016
Snippets of a Friday night spent in the theatre:
Paralyzed by sorrow she is.
Serafina.
A woman in her stationary world.
The house as a nest, the house as source of life in constant motion, spinning around following the still flow of time.
Three hours and all the little lights refracted in a boundless second.
An entire universe ressonating in the public life that palpitates within the transparent walls of this house.
With fury, with passion, with devotion.
With hysteria?
Or with yearning?
Yearning to hear the star-noises.
The electrifying sparks crackling in the air.
A man’s love tattooed with fire on the woman’s bosom, just beneath her translucent skin.
A Rose. Symbol of mystery and beauty, of the secret of life implanted in what is most intimate, in moist petal-heartbeats, in the throbbing red blood.
A daughter and a mirror.
Her mother’s reflection.
Rebelling against her own image.
A tender and scented Rose.
Her father’s reincarnation.
The abyss of pain and the serendipitous power that comes from abandonment, from betrayal.
Serafina’s soul, shielded.
Her body, barren.
Her house, locked.
Her Rose Tattooed heart, bleeding.
The acrid smell of deception and the indomitable courage that derive from lucidity. The impulse, the rampant need to glue back together the broken pieces of shattered fate through sexual healing.
A journey towards the light wherein life is rekindled in incandescent Roses beating with two hearts full of future.
In “The Rose Tattoo” Tennessee Williams surprises the spectator in blending together the grotesquely comical, the mystic symbolism and the unhinged dramatism that surround the recently widowed Serafina Della Rosa, a plump middle-aged Sicilian seamstress who is equally hilarious and unstable, and her teenage daughter Rosa, whose lust for a local sailor represents the tensions between the Sicilian and the American communities at the beginning of the 20thC.
The virtue of pure love and the almost deranged religious devotion that impregnate Serafina’s soul and her frantic attempts to disclose the enigmas of her deceased husband Rosario, whose idealized presence is constantly invoked yet never materialized, tinges the story with visual and auditive effects that make of this play a multisensorial experience. A bleating goat, a sinister witch whose malocchio plagues Serafina, the voices of children in chorus of premonitory passion, every detail pumps meaning into the pulsating heart of the story.
Rosario resists being locked in romanticized memories or reduced to ashes in a funeral urn or tamed by marital convention, but Serafina’s obstinate resentment and debasing sloppiness corrodes her daughter’s full bloom and their reputation in the Sicilian community. Only the well-dressed and faceless manequins remain Serafina’s faithful confidants until a clownish man with a Dionysian body crosses her path and liberates her from a self-made prison of grief and delusion.
I was fortunate enough to see “The Rose Tattoo” on the stage in the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya* last January and to experience Tennessee Williams’ uncanny talent as a visual writer.
I don’t think I would have appreciated this play half as much as I did hadn’t I seen it performed in live. One can’t escape from the intensity of Williams’ plays, which exult the spectator with their aural rythms, stimulating light effects and spiritual symbolism, or from his multifaceted and hot-blooded characters, whom Williams considered family. Maybe it was not a coincidence after all that his beloved sister’s name was Rose.
I can’t help but admire Tennessee Williams, a poetic realist, a man who set himself free through the act of writing and then liberated the rest of us shaping his words into living stage-pictures made of flesh-and-bone characters, whose realities will permeate our consciousness long after they have vanished into nothingness, long after the curtains have been drawn, long after the stage goes pitch-black. There will always remain the eternal glow of having witnessed something truly magic.
*http://www.tnc.cat/ca/la-rosa-tatuada...
I saw the play in Catalan performed by superb Clara Segura playing as Serafina but reading William's original choice of words completed the circle.
Paralyzed by sorrow she is.
Serafina.
A woman in her stationary world.
The house as a nest, the house as source of life in constant motion, spinning around following the still flow of time.
Three hours and all the little lights refracted in a boundless second.
An entire universe ressonating in the public life that palpitates within the transparent walls of this house.
With fury, with passion, with devotion.
With hysteria?
Or with yearning?
Yearning to hear the star-noises.
The electrifying sparks crackling in the air.
A man’s love tattooed with fire on the woman’s bosom, just beneath her translucent skin.
A Rose. Symbol of mystery and beauty, of the secret of life implanted in what is most intimate, in moist petal-heartbeats, in the throbbing red blood.
A daughter and a mirror.
Her mother’s reflection.
Rebelling against her own image.
A tender and scented Rose.
Her father’s reincarnation.
The abyss of pain and the serendipitous power that comes from abandonment, from betrayal.
Serafina’s soul, shielded.
Her body, barren.
Her house, locked.
Her Rose Tattooed heart, bleeding.
The acrid smell of deception and the indomitable courage that derive from lucidity. The impulse, the rampant need to glue back together the broken pieces of shattered fate through sexual healing.
A journey towards the light wherein life is rekindled in incandescent Roses beating with two hearts full of future.
In “The Rose Tattoo” Tennessee Williams surprises the spectator in blending together the grotesquely comical, the mystic symbolism and the unhinged dramatism that surround the recently widowed Serafina Della Rosa, a plump middle-aged Sicilian seamstress who is equally hilarious and unstable, and her teenage daughter Rosa, whose lust for a local sailor represents the tensions between the Sicilian and the American communities at the beginning of the 20thC.
The virtue of pure love and the almost deranged religious devotion that impregnate Serafina’s soul and her frantic attempts to disclose the enigmas of her deceased husband Rosario, whose idealized presence is constantly invoked yet never materialized, tinges the story with visual and auditive effects that make of this play a multisensorial experience. A bleating goat, a sinister witch whose malocchio plagues Serafina, the voices of children in chorus of premonitory passion, every detail pumps meaning into the pulsating heart of the story.
Rosario resists being locked in romanticized memories or reduced to ashes in a funeral urn or tamed by marital convention, but Serafina’s obstinate resentment and debasing sloppiness corrodes her daughter’s full bloom and their reputation in the Sicilian community. Only the well-dressed and faceless manequins remain Serafina’s faithful confidants until a clownish man with a Dionysian body crosses her path and liberates her from a self-made prison of grief and delusion.
I was fortunate enough to see “The Rose Tattoo” on the stage in the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya* last January and to experience Tennessee Williams’ uncanny talent as a visual writer.
I don’t think I would have appreciated this play half as much as I did hadn’t I seen it performed in live. One can’t escape from the intensity of Williams’ plays, which exult the spectator with their aural rythms, stimulating light effects and spiritual symbolism, or from his multifaceted and hot-blooded characters, whom Williams considered family. Maybe it was not a coincidence after all that his beloved sister’s name was Rose.
I can’t help but admire Tennessee Williams, a poetic realist, a man who set himself free through the act of writing and then liberated the rest of us shaping his words into living stage-pictures made of flesh-and-bone characters, whose realities will permeate our consciousness long after they have vanished into nothingness, long after the curtains have been drawn, long after the stage goes pitch-black. There will always remain the eternal glow of having witnessed something truly magic.
*http://www.tnc.cat/ca/la-rosa-tatuada...
I saw the play in Catalan performed by superb Clara Segura playing as Serafina but reading William's original choice of words completed the circle.
August 15, 2025
The Rose Tattoo
Tennessee Williams is most often remembered as a lyrical writer of tragedy and lurid violence and as the author of three classic plays: "The Glass Menagerie", "A Streetcar Named Desire", and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Williams wrote many other plays in different styles. Among the best of his works is this romance, "The Rose Tattoo", a play which is too-little known today. Cheryl Crawford directed the play when it opened on Broadway in 1951 starring Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach. The play, Stapleton, and Wallach each won Tony Awards. In 1955, Williams wrote the screenplay for the film version of "The Rose Tattoo" which became famous for the Academy Award winning performance of Anna Magnani. Williams wrote an introduction, "The Timeless World of a Play" to "The Rose Tattoo" in which he said: "Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a tragic sense of impermanence." He argued that a play gave the opportunity to suspend time by allowing its audience to share in human emotion and change as spectators and so to understand oneself and one another better, if only for a moment. This short, difficult essay is an apt introduction to the play.
The three-act play is set around 1950 in an unnamed town on the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile with a large population of Sicilian immigrants. The play tells the story of a middle-aged Sicilian immigrant woman, Serafina Delle Rose who passes from grief and despair to love and sexuality and to a second chance at life. In the opening scenes, Serafina is pregnant and married to a man named Rosario and the couple have a 12-year old daughter, Rosa. Rosario never appears in the play. He is killed almost immediately when he is smuggling contraband for the underworld under a truckload of bananas. Serafina, who works as a seamstress, is shaken to the extent that she loses the baby. She lives solely with the memory of Rosario and of his sexual prowess, symbolized by the rose tattoo on his chest. She comes to idealize her dead husband and fights fiercely to repress compelling evidence of his long-term infidelity.
Most of the play is set in a single day three years after Rosario's death. Serafina continues to mourn his passing and loses interest in her friends and in other people. She becomes over-protective of Rosa, who is now an adolescent graduating from high school who has fallen in love with Jack, a young sailor. Serafina meets an uncouth but magnetically attractive young man, Alvaro, who also drives a truck for a living and who reminds her of her late husband. The sexual attraction is immediate. In long scenes between Rosa and Alvaro, Williams develops their relationship. Serafina comes to terms with the frailties of her husband and with love and romance. She is able to love herself and to release her daughter to her own life.
The play is lengthy and takes concentration to read. It is full of symbolism, including the rose tattoo, religious icons, a watch, a randy goat, a flamboyant pink shirt and more. The Sicilian immigrant community is vividly drawn with eccentric characters including a herbal doctor and a witch. The play includes some Italian dialogue which is best read over quickly as its meaning is generally clear from the context. I found it helpful to watch the film version between readings of the play to help visualize the action. Magnani's portrayal of Serafina brings the character to life more than any reading could do. Although the film version is bowdlerized, the spirit of Williams' play comes through.
John Lahr's biography "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" (2014) devotes substantial space to Williams' writing of "The Rose Tattoo" and to its biographical significance. Williams wrote several early drafts which were critiqued by Elia Kazan, who had already directed several of Williams' plays. Williams wrote and rewrote to adopt Kazan's suggestions into the final version of the play. When he had completed the final draft, Kazan, after hesitation, declined to direct the work, to Williams' great disappointment. In this instance, Williams was right to have faith in the worth of his play, as suggested by the Tony Award. Years later, in 1959, Kazan would back out from directing another Williams comedy, the far less successful play, "Period of Adjustment". Williams and Kazan never worked together again.
"The Rose Tattoo" is a beautiful play about disappointment and grief and about the power of love and sexuality to redeem life. In addition to this individual version, the play is available in the first of the two Library of America volumes devoted to the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Robin Friedman
Tennessee Williams is most often remembered as a lyrical writer of tragedy and lurid violence and as the author of three classic plays: "The Glass Menagerie", "A Streetcar Named Desire", and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Williams wrote many other plays in different styles. Among the best of his works is this romance, "The Rose Tattoo", a play which is too-little known today. Cheryl Crawford directed the play when it opened on Broadway in 1951 starring Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach. The play, Stapleton, and Wallach each won Tony Awards. In 1955, Williams wrote the screenplay for the film version of "The Rose Tattoo" which became famous for the Academy Award winning performance of Anna Magnani. Williams wrote an introduction, "The Timeless World of a Play" to "The Rose Tattoo" in which he said: "Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a tragic sense of impermanence." He argued that a play gave the opportunity to suspend time by allowing its audience to share in human emotion and change as spectators and so to understand oneself and one another better, if only for a moment. This short, difficult essay is an apt introduction to the play.
The three-act play is set around 1950 in an unnamed town on the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile with a large population of Sicilian immigrants. The play tells the story of a middle-aged Sicilian immigrant woman, Serafina Delle Rose who passes from grief and despair to love and sexuality and to a second chance at life. In the opening scenes, Serafina is pregnant and married to a man named Rosario and the couple have a 12-year old daughter, Rosa. Rosario never appears in the play. He is killed almost immediately when he is smuggling contraband for the underworld under a truckload of bananas. Serafina, who works as a seamstress, is shaken to the extent that she loses the baby. She lives solely with the memory of Rosario and of his sexual prowess, symbolized by the rose tattoo on his chest. She comes to idealize her dead husband and fights fiercely to repress compelling evidence of his long-term infidelity.
Most of the play is set in a single day three years after Rosario's death. Serafina continues to mourn his passing and loses interest in her friends and in other people. She becomes over-protective of Rosa, who is now an adolescent graduating from high school who has fallen in love with Jack, a young sailor. Serafina meets an uncouth but magnetically attractive young man, Alvaro, who also drives a truck for a living and who reminds her of her late husband. The sexual attraction is immediate. In long scenes between Rosa and Alvaro, Williams develops their relationship. Serafina comes to terms with the frailties of her husband and with love and romance. She is able to love herself and to release her daughter to her own life.
The play is lengthy and takes concentration to read. It is full of symbolism, including the rose tattoo, religious icons, a watch, a randy goat, a flamboyant pink shirt and more. The Sicilian immigrant community is vividly drawn with eccentric characters including a herbal doctor and a witch. The play includes some Italian dialogue which is best read over quickly as its meaning is generally clear from the context. I found it helpful to watch the film version between readings of the play to help visualize the action. Magnani's portrayal of Serafina brings the character to life more than any reading could do. Although the film version is bowdlerized, the spirit of Williams' play comes through.
John Lahr's biography "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" (2014) devotes substantial space to Williams' writing of "The Rose Tattoo" and to its biographical significance. Williams wrote several early drafts which were critiqued by Elia Kazan, who had already directed several of Williams' plays. Williams wrote and rewrote to adopt Kazan's suggestions into the final version of the play. When he had completed the final draft, Kazan, after hesitation, declined to direct the work, to Williams' great disappointment. In this instance, Williams was right to have faith in the worth of his play, as suggested by the Tony Award. Years later, in 1959, Kazan would back out from directing another Williams comedy, the far less successful play, "Period of Adjustment". Williams and Kazan never worked together again.
"The Rose Tattoo" is a beautiful play about disappointment and grief and about the power of love and sexuality to redeem life. In addition to this individual version, the play is available in the first of the two Library of America volumes devoted to the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Robin Friedman
April 22, 2014
Highway signs: "Slippery When Wet." ~~ "Truck Drivers in Rear."
You may know a lot or a little about Blanche, Alma, Maggie, Maxine, Laura, Stella, Amanda, The Princess and Myrtle...but few can recall the big Sicilian peasant, Serafina Delle Rose -- the first 10 Williams heroine who isn't repressed in any way. Living off the Gulf Coast in this lusty-busty romance (1951), she's a monumental babe -- an emotional, impulsive, simple-minded creature who misses her truck-driving husband who was killed while smuggling narcotics in his truckload of bananas. He had a rose tattooed on his chest.
How she deals with this traumatic loss and unborn baby shape the action : hearing that husby had a mistress she prays to the virgin for a sign to confirm or deny the rumors. Ow, her anguish, her passion (the role was allegedly written for Anna Magnani who did the forgotten film). Husby was perfection and, you realize, his perfection was his sexual prowess.
In this folkloric comedy - seldom produced today - she meets a not very bright beau (another trucker) and redefines her dream, though it centers on her sexual neediness. We must always Make Do, as grandmum would say. 10 is in a compassionate mood : Serafina faces this and that truth, and her suitor soon has a rose tattoo on his chest. "Oh, Lady!" she cries to the virgin, "give me a sign." Rose is a rose.
You may know a lot or a little about Blanche, Alma, Maggie, Maxine, Laura, Stella, Amanda, The Princess and Myrtle...but few can recall the big Sicilian peasant, Serafina Delle Rose -- the first 10 Williams heroine who isn't repressed in any way. Living off the Gulf Coast in this lusty-busty romance (1951), she's a monumental babe -- an emotional, impulsive, simple-minded creature who misses her truck-driving husband who was killed while smuggling narcotics in his truckload of bananas. He had a rose tattooed on his chest.
How she deals with this traumatic loss and unborn baby shape the action : hearing that husby had a mistress she prays to the virgin for a sign to confirm or deny the rumors. Ow, her anguish, her passion (the role was allegedly written for Anna Magnani who did the forgotten film). Husby was perfection and, you realize, his perfection was his sexual prowess.
In this folkloric comedy - seldom produced today - she meets a not very bright beau (another trucker) and redefines her dream, though it centers on her sexual neediness. We must always Make Do, as grandmum would say. 10 is in a compassionate mood : Serafina faces this and that truth, and her suitor soon has a rose tattoo on his chest. "Oh, Lady!" she cries to the virgin, "give me a sign." Rose is a rose.
June 9, 2016
This one was a real clunker. I thought the structure was clumsy, the characters both ugly and uninteresting, and the plot veered on silliness. This is one I'm actually glad that I didn't see on stage, because I'm afraid that it would tend to be even worse when performed. I've never read a play that has as much business described as this one does, and I didn't really see the point of much of it. Not T. Williams at his best, or even close.
May 29, 2023
"The Rose Tattoo" is not one of Tennessee Williams better plays, probably because it is a comedy of sorts written by an author known more for his dramatic works. He continues with his mastery of the female lead portrayal, however. Serafina is a widow living on the Gulf Coast with her fifteen year old daughter. Her love for her dead husband continues undiminished even though her neighbors know that he was unfaithful. Although she has heard the rumors too, she remains stubbornly ignorant. But she is also stubbornly grieving and she demands that her daughter continue to grieve as well. Her daughter is very bright and, being quite mature for her age, she longs to spread her wings and see more of the world. More specifically though, she falls in love with a sailor on leave and wants to marry him. This clash between the two women leads to most of the conflict in the play and the growth of the two characters.
The play is nothing especially overwhelming and its comedic moments fall flat. What is overwhelming however is the symbolism of the rose throughout. As a symbol of love the dead husband bears the rose tattoo on his chest. His name is Rosario de la Rose. His daughter and Serafina's is named Rosa. A woman that Rosario was involved with had a rose tattooed on her chest. The truck driver, Alvaro, who provides most of the slapstick comedy, tries to win Serafina's hand and also has a rose tattooed on his chest during the course of the play. Serafina is a sewer who sews a rose colored shirt for Alvaro. There are roses all over the house and people are always bringing roses. Honestly, it was as though the play took place in a funeral parlor. Which was the effect Tennessee had intended.
But "The Rose Tattoo" is all about Serafina, a name that in Italian means fiery, burning. And she is that. As an author noted for his extraordinary women characterizations, Tennessee's Serafina is one of his few female creations who is the lead character. She is lusty, imperious, fanatical, obtuse, sacrilegious, slovenly. Unfortunately Williams didn't provide a character to dish it right back or put her in her place. So the play has to live and die with Serafina and it just never rose to a higher level for me.
The play is nothing especially overwhelming and its comedic moments fall flat. What is overwhelming however is the symbolism of the rose throughout. As a symbol of love the dead husband bears the rose tattoo on his chest. His name is Rosario de la Rose. His daughter and Serafina's is named Rosa. A woman that Rosario was involved with had a rose tattooed on her chest. The truck driver, Alvaro, who provides most of the slapstick comedy, tries to win Serafina's hand and also has a rose tattooed on his chest during the course of the play. Serafina is a sewer who sews a rose colored shirt for Alvaro. There are roses all over the house and people are always bringing roses. Honestly, it was as though the play took place in a funeral parlor. Which was the effect Tennessee had intended.
But "The Rose Tattoo" is all about Serafina, a name that in Italian means fiery, burning. And she is that. As an author noted for his extraordinary women characterizations, Tennessee's Serafina is one of his few female creations who is the lead character. She is lusty, imperious, fanatical, obtuse, sacrilegious, slovenly. Unfortunately Williams didn't provide a character to dish it right back or put her in her place. So the play has to live and die with Serafina and it just never rose to a higher level for me.
February 20, 2019
An article told me that this play is a rom-com? Did those words mean different things in the 50's?
August 31, 2019
I read this play in preparation for seeing it on Broadway with a terrific actress in the lead, Marisa Tomei (of My Cousin Vinny fame). Williams tells the story of a Sicilian woman in the deep South...I found this very realistic very in term of her ethnic background. Maybe a little repetitious, but very well presented generally by a master playwright.
June 16, 2023
Ο σπουδαίος Tennessee Williams, οπωσδήποτε ο αγαπημένος μου σύγχρονος θεατρικός συγγραφέας, γράφει εδώ μια τραγικωμωδία. Δηλαδή ένα έργο με κωμικό περίβλημα αλλά τραγική βάση.
Και το κάνει εξαιρετικά, και κυρίως με ΜΕΤΡΟ, χωρίς υπερβολές στην υπερβολή των ρόλων, όσο κιαν τούτο ακούγεται κάπως περίεργο, καταφέρονοντας να ισορροπήσει ανάμεσα στα αισθήματα.
Και το κάνει εξαιρετικά, και κυρίως με ΜΕΤΡΟ, χωρίς υπερβολές στην υπερβολή των ρόλων, όσο κιαν τούτο ακούγεται κάπως περίεργο, καταφέρονοντας να ισορροπήσει ανάμεσα στα αισθήματα.
August 16, 2018
I'm underwhelmed; a big William's fan, I found "The Rose Tattoo" to be little more than a collage of a lot other elements that the author integrates into almost every one of his works.
Serafina Del Rose is a woman highly infatuated and in love with her husband Rosario, and when he dies her passion for him doesn't -- his manly, rugged body marked by a rose tattoo is the one she still dreams of five years past, to the embarassment of her community and especially of her daughter, who wishes they could both move on with their lives.
The thing is, with Williams, you can still see the intensisty dripping from the pages; though it is one of his weaker plots. He doesn't say anything here he has n0t said before. Infatuation with body? Covered by Stella in "Streetcar Named Desire". Death, aging, inability to move on, all of it felt rehashed and unsurprising. The Rose Tattoo led nowhere, and read like a copy paste of the author's previous works, giving the impression Tennessee Williams had no new themes to address or points to make.
Serafina Del Rose is a woman highly infatuated and in love with her husband Rosario, and when he dies her passion for him doesn't -- his manly, rugged body marked by a rose tattoo is the one she still dreams of five years past, to the embarassment of her community and especially of her daughter, who wishes they could both move on with their lives.
The thing is, with Williams, you can still see the intensisty dripping from the pages; though it is one of his weaker plots. He doesn't say anything here he has n0t said before. Infatuation with body? Covered by Stella in "Streetcar Named Desire". Death, aging, inability to move on, all of it felt rehashed and unsurprising. The Rose Tattoo led nowhere, and read like a copy paste of the author's previous works, giving the impression Tennessee Williams had no new themes to address or points to make.
February 25, 2018
This one is really different from the other plays I've read so far. The problem for me is the caricature of Italians here... I honestly don't know if Italians are the way depicted by non-Italians in literature and film, but it always feels like stereotyping a culture when we focus on just their most noticable aspect only, here passion. I would have had more respect if the play was set with Americans rather than stereotyped Italians. The plot and action are entertaining enoughl but there is nothing like emotional depth or complexity. Instead, it read at times like slapstick.
December 18, 2011
The Rose Tattoo is a great play. It is a play with many relevant and important themes: love, sexuality, loneliness, motherhood etc... The majority of characters are Sicilians. I think that T.W manages to capture something of their culture and at any rate he doesn't stereotype them. Moreover, the characters are complex and this is especially the case with Serafina. As often with T. Williams, it is a female character that is in the centre of the play. This time the heroin is Serafina Delle Rose. The other characters are complex, but not that developed as she is. Now when I think of it, they are in a way shadowed by Serafina.
The play begins with Serafina sitting on the sofa waiting for her husband Rosario's return. Serafina worships hers 'wild as a gypsy' husband and founds physical and spiritual fulfillment in her marriage. In addition, marriage is sacred to Serafina and being a Roman-Catholic makes her see marriage as a sacrament. In a way, she makes religion out of her love. There are many questions about love that can be drawn from this play. Is love a kind of religion? What is the link between body and soul? Can love go on forever? etc...
Well, it's not a drama if two people fall in a love, get married and live happily ever after, is it? I don’t think it is a spoiler if I say there is trouble in paradise i.e. Serafina’s marriage. Serafina is portrayed as a human being that is with faults and virtues. Like Blanche from Streetcar she has her weaknesses. Nevertheless, Serafina is like Blanche in her own way a strong woman. She doesn't give up easily, she defends her love. Serafina's tragic fate is just the kind that takes us on a road of soul-searching.
Loneliness and isolation are something that can be felt in this play. I always like the way that cultures clash in Williams’ plays. The cultural distance created in his plays deepens that sense of loneliness. Serafina belong to another culture, she is an Italian immigrant. In Williams’ play it is usually the clash between the south and the west of USA that creates trouble, so in that sense this play is a bit different.
I'm trying to remember if there ever was a play by T.Williams that I did not like. I don't think there was. I guess I just like his style of writing and there is something in me that resonances with his main themes of isolation, love, despair and loneliness. There is also something poetic about his language and this play is no exception.
The play begins with Serafina sitting on the sofa waiting for her husband Rosario's return. Serafina worships hers 'wild as a gypsy' husband and founds physical and spiritual fulfillment in her marriage. In addition, marriage is sacred to Serafina and being a Roman-Catholic makes her see marriage as a sacrament. In a way, she makes religion out of her love. There are many questions about love that can be drawn from this play. Is love a kind of religion? What is the link between body and soul? Can love go on forever? etc...
Well, it's not a drama if two people fall in a love, get married and live happily ever after, is it? I don’t think it is a spoiler if I say there is trouble in paradise i.e. Serafina’s marriage. Serafina is portrayed as a human being that is with faults and virtues. Like Blanche from Streetcar she has her weaknesses. Nevertheless, Serafina is like Blanche in her own way a strong woman. She doesn't give up easily, she defends her love. Serafina's tragic fate is just the kind that takes us on a road of soul-searching.
Loneliness and isolation are something that can be felt in this play. I always like the way that cultures clash in Williams’ plays. The cultural distance created in his plays deepens that sense of loneliness. Serafina belong to another culture, she is an Italian immigrant. In Williams’ play it is usually the clash between the south and the west of USA that creates trouble, so in that sense this play is a bit different.
I'm trying to remember if there ever was a play by T.Williams that I did not like. I don't think there was. I guess I just like his style of writing and there is something in me that resonances with his main themes of isolation, love, despair and loneliness. There is also something poetic about his language and this play is no exception.
July 7, 2022
I'm never quite sure how to feel about Tennessee Williams. His penchant for overheated characters and climates gives all his work the feel of overripe fruit, wrinkled laundry...and in this case, overblown dark-red roses with bruised petals. From an emotional standpoint, it's a fine piece of art, with the colors vividly bleeding through the scenes. It's not realistic at all, of course, and I don't think I could stand to see it acted by anything less than a quality, professional company. There is just too much opportunity for bad accents, and overacting. Realistic action or not, the emotion has to be true.
I'm mostly mad about how unfair literally everything was to Jack. He walked in with good intentions, got lied to, berated, and he just did the best he could. As far as T.W.'s characters go, he's one of the nicer ones. Rosa too--not a thing wrong with that girl besides a perenially overwrought mother. Even Serafina gets a little sympathy from me--that girl was married at 14 to her crush, essentially, and never fell out of love with him. Life was roses and now she's an overweight waterlogged batch of potpourri. She has a 15 year old daughter but emotionally she's nothing more than a child herself.
I guess that's the point of this type of theater--explore emotions rarely seen in daily life, and imagine what could happen to make those emotions boil to the surface.
I'm mostly mad about how unfair literally everything was to Jack. He walked in with good intentions, got lied to, berated, and he just did the best he could. As far as T.W.'s characters go, he's one of the nicer ones. Rosa too--not a thing wrong with that girl besides a perenially overwrought mother. Even Serafina gets a little sympathy from me--that girl was married at 14 to her crush, essentially, and never fell out of love with him. Life was roses and now she's an overweight waterlogged batch of potpourri. She has a 15 year old daughter but emotionally she's nothing more than a child herself.
I guess that's the point of this type of theater--explore emotions rarely seen in daily life, and imagine what could happen to make those emotions boil to the surface.
April 1, 2008
Not a fan, though, I should preface that by saying that I'm not really a fan of Tenessee Williams in general (what kind of name is that anyway? Who names their kid after a state?). I don't share his fascination with abusive relationships, nor do I find the tragic romance in them that he does (call me a prude, but I am offended at the idea that anyone could find redeeming romantic qualities in an abusive relationship, especially a male writer).
Anyway, slipping off now to allow my high horse to stretch his legs and get some water.
It is another dark sketch of the tragic life of an "everyman" character, having been pushed to despiration by life itself. Its a bit self-indulgent for my taste, but I've read/seen worse.
Anyway, slipping off now to allow my high horse to stretch his legs and get some water.
It is another dark sketch of the tragic life of an "everyman" character, having been pushed to despiration by life itself. Its a bit self-indulgent for my taste, but I've read/seen worse.
October 22, 2015
Very funny (also tragic). Williams uses warmth, imagination and humor to tackle serious issues (poverty, mourning/melancholia, crime, adultery). The actor playing Serafina needs some serious comic timing skills—I was thinking of the woman who plays Fanny’s mother in *Funny Girl*—that lady would have been PERFECT. The end of the final scene is more visual/artistic than naturalistic, but it fits the mood and is cool. My take-away line:
“Don’t be ashame of nothing, the world is too crazy for people to be ashame in it. I’m not ashame and I had two fights on the street and my daughter called me ‘disgusting.’” Yes!
“Don’t be ashame of nothing, the world is too crazy for people to be ashame in it. I’m not ashame and I had two fights on the street and my daughter called me ‘disgusting.’” Yes!
December 5, 2016
I didn't actually finish reading this script, that's how uninteresting the characters felt to me. I gave it through the entire first act, so I don't think it was just that I hadn't reached the important part. I normally enjoy reading scripts but I found myself thinking "I hope no theatre I'm a part of decides to do this show" with this one to be totally honest. The daughter seemed like maybe she could have been interesting but the mothers development lacked so much and left me wanting to much I couldn't even continue :/
April 24, 2017
I don't know any Italian, so this play was a challenge to read. I like the idea that Serafina's ability to love was sealed inside the urn with her husband's ashes, only released when the urn was broken. The side story with her daughter, Rosa, was boring.
May 17, 2007
I fell in love with Serafina Delle Rose. She makes a wish, she takes a risk, she opens up her door... God exists if you just stop worshipping some arbitrary "Him".
February 26, 2016
تينيسي ويليامز.. عبقري
April 7, 2021
I want to take this play out to dinner and then cuddle with it on the couch afterwards.
Three well-deserved stars.
Three well-deserved stars.
November 2, 2022
A nice farce around women’s sexuality.
July 20, 2020
The Rose Tattoo (1951) by Tennessee Williams is a wonderful play by the author.
The play follows the story of the protagonist Serafina Delle Rose. She is an Italian woman and a seamstress who lives in a Sicilian community in Louisiana. She is pregnant and also has a daughter Rosa. She loves her husband Rosario to bits but Rosario is not what he seems. He is having an affair with a local woman Estelle and is a smuggler. After he is shot and killed by police, Serafina overhears some women who are neighbours discussing how they will break the news to her and her grief begins.
Her own past pain, because though she loved Rosario with all her heart she knew his faults even though she was in denial, also comes in her negative feelings when three years later Rosa meets a guy she loves called Jack. I also think the negative feelings are because she fears if Jack died, Rosa would go through the same pain she did. So it’s protective but it’s also stopping her daughter from happiness and Serafina does not communicate very well her fears through whatever. Pride? Fear to be honest about it? An I’m the Mother and I don’t have to explain myself attitude. Whatever the reason or reasons, her communication skills with her daughter are lacking severely which is unfair to Rosa. Williams brings many topics into this story such as family dynamics, immigration, sexuality and romantic feelings, communication issues, finding your place in the world, grief and mental illness.
I think it is an amazing play. I was engrossed in the characters and the plot from start to finish. The writing is gorgeously down-to-earth and the dialogue, which is especially the heart of a play, is amazing, spot-on and realistic. Williams didn’t stereotype the characters which was wonderful but not surprising either considering his boyfriend Frank Merlo was a Sicilian-American man from Louisiana and the play is based a lot on Merlo’s family history and background. The play is also dedicated to Merlo.
Beautifully written. Amazing job. A must-read. I loved it! 🙂
The play follows the story of the protagonist Serafina Delle Rose. She is an Italian woman and a seamstress who lives in a Sicilian community in Louisiana. She is pregnant and also has a daughter Rosa. She loves her husband Rosario to bits but Rosario is not what he seems. He is having an affair with a local woman Estelle and is a smuggler. After he is shot and killed by police, Serafina overhears some women who are neighbours discussing how they will break the news to her and her grief begins.
Her own past pain, because though she loved Rosario with all her heart she knew his faults even though she was in denial, also comes in her negative feelings when three years later Rosa meets a guy she loves called Jack. I also think the negative feelings are because she fears if Jack died, Rosa would go through the same pain she did. So it’s protective but it’s also stopping her daughter from happiness and Serafina does not communicate very well her fears through whatever. Pride? Fear to be honest about it? An I’m the Mother and I don’t have to explain myself attitude. Whatever the reason or reasons, her communication skills with her daughter are lacking severely which is unfair to Rosa. Williams brings many topics into this story such as family dynamics, immigration, sexuality and romantic feelings, communication issues, finding your place in the world, grief and mental illness.
I think it is an amazing play. I was engrossed in the characters and the plot from start to finish. The writing is gorgeously down-to-earth and the dialogue, which is especially the heart of a play, is amazing, spot-on and realistic. Williams didn’t stereotype the characters which was wonderful but not surprising either considering his boyfriend Frank Merlo was a Sicilian-American man from Louisiana and the play is based a lot on Merlo’s family history and background. The play is also dedicated to Merlo.
Beautifully written. Amazing job. A must-read. I loved it! 🙂
March 28, 2021
I like Tennessee Williams’ Art House Melodrama. I respond to it in much the same way as I respond to the film melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, as works of excess, but while Sirk and Minnelli express overheated emotions in terms of visual excess, Williams expresses overheated emotion in terms of verbal excess. One of the things I find intriguing about Williams is the way his plays generally work within realist conventions, but the melodramatic pushes against this. There is always the danger that they can become ludicrous…at least, in naturalistic terms, but, to be perfectly honest, I’m not much bothered about such things. I had heard of The Rose Tattoo, but knew little about it, never seeing a production or film version. It has a very Tennessee Williams’ plot: a mother of a teenaged girl is widowed and withdraws from the world; she also attempts to ‘protect’ her daughter from men; emotional trauma is created when she finds out that her idealised husband was having an affair and her daughter rebels. O.K., this is a simplified and probably misleading summing up and leaves out, for instance, the man who comes sniffing around with sexual opportunism. But if you know Tennessee Williams’ work you will probably get the gist of the characters and the atmosphere. The play, however, is set among a community of poor Italian-Americans. The emotional ‘over-the-topness’ becomes naturalised, it is the way poor Italian-Americans behave: treating Italian-Americans as ‘primitives’ is dubious, but ‘explaining’ the melodramatic emotional excess in terms of cultural background undermines one of the basic interests in Williams’ work: the tension between naturalism or normality and emotional excess is done away with: the melodramatic emotion doesn’t conflict with what could be called the normal emotional state of American society because in The Rose Tattoo the society we see only operates at the level of emotional excess. The Rose Tattoo has its interests, but, on one reading, it seems a lesser or minor play by Williams.
November 11, 2020
An interesting account of a woman and the series of tragic events she endures in a short period.
October 29, 2020
I've always adored Tennessee Williams' work, but in all the years I've been reading his plays (and seeing them), and his poetry I never got around to The Rose Tattoo. I'm so glad this edition includes some extras! I'm so used to the high drama of Williams' more well know works, so it was a joy to read Rose Tattoo with it's melodrama, it's comedy and it's borderline slapstick. An over the top romantic comedy complete with a witch and a renegade goat. This edition also includes the short play that would eventually become the full length Rose Tattoo, an insightful intro by John Patrick Shanley, a critical essay showing the genesis of the short play to the full length play, Tennessee' explanation of the meaning of The Rose Tattoo as well as a chronology of Williams' life and publications.
May 31, 2016
The Rose Tattoo concerns one Serafina delle Rosa, a first-generation Sicilian-American who lives somewhere on the Gulf Coast with her 15-year-old daughter Rose. Her husband Rosario, a small-time drug smuggler, was murdered and Serafina lost the baby she was carrying shortly thereafter. Since then, she has sequestered herself and her daughter from their small Italian community and spends her listless days in a worn shift, sewing gowns and fine clothes for other people's special events. Three years have passed and it is now Rosa's high school graduation, signaling her movement out from under her mother's authority and into adulthood and her own self-realization. This terrifies Serafina, who wants Rosa suspended in time with her and her late husband's memory. Even worse is that sailor Rosa has fallen for! But then Alvaro Mangiacavallo ("eat-a-horse" in Italian), a goofy truck driver with a sexy body, arrives that afternoon and - oh Dio! He reminds Serafina of Rosario and has even gotten his very own rose tattoo!
According to editor Shanley, "The Rose Tattoo is over the top. It is a lurid play, redolent of the smell of goats, the cries of ragged children and squawking birds. Its perimeters are defined by women, hairy-legged women, gossiping, clownish women, whores, and witches." I actually had a feeling of déjà vu. The oppressive tropical ambiance; the voluptuous, larger-than-life widow; the emotional stagnation and pervasive carnality - The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana feel like two versions of the same story. Written about a decade later, Iguana comes across as a more mature work, with its themes of sexuality, religion, mental illness, and human nature. It also lacks the neat resolution of The Rose Tattoo and the cast of characters is more diverse, ranging from pure and detached (Hannah) to Serafina-like (Maxine) to falling apart as we speak (Shannon).
Which isn't to say that The Rose Tattoo is a mediocre play or not worth it if you've already read/seen Iguana. It's a comedy starring a tacky, ridiculous woman who lives surrounded by dress dummies and Catholic kitsch. Alvaro is a love-struck doofus. The Italian accents are preposterously exaggerated and the overall setting is clearly a satire of the close-knit, gossipy immigrant community. Serafine tries so hard to be spiritual she simply ends up ironic.
Iguana certainly has comic relief but Tattoo is such a self-parody that it borders on metatheater. It knows its atmosphere is overheated and blatantly sexual and populated by caricatures. The humor comes from its own premise and execution. If anything, The Rose Tattoo, despite being the earlier of the two, is also a parody of The Night of the Iguana, which has many of the same elements but asks to be taken seriously. It's like Iguana reflected in a funhouse mirror.
This new edition of The Rose Tattoo also includes The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View, an earlier one-act piece by Williams that became the genesis for Tattoo. I haven't read anything else by Williams so I wouldn't know if his other plays are more differentiated, but I found The Rose Tattoo to be a great companion piece and counterpoint for The Night of the Iguana. I enjoyed reading them and would love to see both onstage.
Original Review
According to editor Shanley, "The Rose Tattoo is over the top. It is a lurid play, redolent of the smell of goats, the cries of ragged children and squawking birds. Its perimeters are defined by women, hairy-legged women, gossiping, clownish women, whores, and witches." I actually had a feeling of déjà vu. The oppressive tropical ambiance; the voluptuous, larger-than-life widow; the emotional stagnation and pervasive carnality - The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana feel like two versions of the same story. Written about a decade later, Iguana comes across as a more mature work, with its themes of sexuality, religion, mental illness, and human nature. It also lacks the neat resolution of The Rose Tattoo and the cast of characters is more diverse, ranging from pure and detached (Hannah) to Serafina-like (Maxine) to falling apart as we speak (Shannon).
Which isn't to say that The Rose Tattoo is a mediocre play or not worth it if you've already read/seen Iguana. It's a comedy starring a tacky, ridiculous woman who lives surrounded by dress dummies and Catholic kitsch. Alvaro is a love-struck doofus. The Italian accents are preposterously exaggerated and the overall setting is clearly a satire of the close-knit, gossipy immigrant community. Serafine tries so hard to be spiritual she simply ends up ironic.
SERAFINA: Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady, give me a sign!
[As if in mocking answer, a novelty salesman appears and approaches the porch. He is a fat man in a seersucker suit and a straw hat with a yellow, red and purple band. His face is beet-red and great moons of sweat have soared through the armpits of his jacket. His shirt is lavender, and his tie, pale blue with great yellow polka dots, is a butterfly bow. His entrance is accompanied by a brief, satiric strain of music.]
Iguana certainly has comic relief but Tattoo is such a self-parody that it borders on metatheater. It knows its atmosphere is overheated and blatantly sexual and populated by caricatures. The humor comes from its own premise and execution. If anything, The Rose Tattoo, despite being the earlier of the two, is also a parody of The Night of the Iguana, which has many of the same elements but asks to be taken seriously. It's like Iguana reflected in a funhouse mirror.
This new edition of The Rose Tattoo also includes The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View, an earlier one-act piece by Williams that became the genesis for Tattoo. I haven't read anything else by Williams so I wouldn't know if his other plays are more differentiated, but I found The Rose Tattoo to be a great companion piece and counterpoint for The Night of the Iguana. I enjoyed reading them and would love to see both onstage.
Original Review
March 19, 2021
The Rose Tattoo (1949/50)
Tennessee Williams
New Directions—Drama
Unlocking the Beasts in the Cage: The Strange and Wild Beauty of Love
“There is nothing more beautiful than a gift between people!”
* * *
“A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.”
* * *
In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’ lapidary 1936 novel, there’s one particular quotation I always keep hovering in the back of my mind and I kept repeating it as I read The Rose Tattoo: “Sometimes one meets a woman who is a beast turning human.” In his 1949-50-penned play, The Rose Tattoo, Tennessee Williams presents wild women, wild men, wild landscapes, and wild rumors, culminating in one ferocious beast of a woman struggling against her supposedly “weak” human side—and eventually submitting to it without apology.
Part melodrama and part screwball comedy (one stage direction even suggests a scene should be acted like an old Charlie Chaplin film), Williams’ The Rose Tattoo is a slight departure from the playwright’s other works. To quote the protagonist: “Everything is too strange.” This play is not only comedic in a laugh-out-loud way (imagine doing that during A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie?!) but is also personal. Dedicated to Frank Merlo—Williams’ partner for 14 years who died of lung cancer in 1963—the play is also an absurd love letter to love itself, and, seemingly, the playwright’s own cathartic experiment in allowing himself to go beyond what audiences and critics expected from his works. This is “both comic and shocking,” as the stage directions note at one interval. So true. That’s this play.
The Rose Tattoo is resplendent with roses. The setting, props, and even names—Rosa, Rosario; the surname delle Rose—deeply-imbue the Gulf Coast milieu with rose-colored glasses. When I saw the 2019 Broadway revival, starring Marisa Tomei and Emun Elliott, the stage was covered in flamingos and projections of pale- or bright-pink skies for much of the play. This over-the-type setting, where symbols loom large and obvious, is nothing new for Williams. But the grotesque comedy, the sometimes heavy use of Italian, the discriminatory epithets used in reference to the Sicilian immigrant population, the fierce physicality of the events, the menagerie of actual animals cavorting (alongside children) on stage, and the rather risqué sexual nature of the play (one director of an Irish production was even arrested—you can look up why) all culminate into something just as wild as you’d expect from Williams but, also, more optimistic. Spoiler Alert: When was the last time you saw a Williams figure flee towards happiness, seemingly poised to get it, by the play’s finale?
The Rose Tattoo tells the story of Serafina delle Rose, a poor Sicilian immigrant who married a “baron,” as she often reminds others, and now lives in the U.S. with a sense of value, virtue, and violent love. She is committed to Rosario, her husband who drives a 10-ten banana truck (and apparently smuggles dope underneath); faithful to the Virgin Mary and her Catholic beliefs; and mother to Rosa with another child on the way. When Rosario dies unexpectedly and she miscarries their child, however, and rumors of Rosario’s infidelity spill out among the neighborhood gossips (including the witch or “The Strega”), Serafina won’t hear it. For three years, she mourns her husband, true to his image and chaste and virtuous. A statue of the Holy Mother robed in the sky and an urn of her husband’s ashes feel more real to her than her actual life, and daughter Rosa grows up like her father—wild and love-crazed. Serafina, once a respected and skilled seamstress, is now reduced to a dishabille, plump woman whom her own daughter calls “disgusting.” Like other Williams figures—Blanche DuBois, the Wingfields—Serafina is a woman working against time. That she can never seem to give her daughter a watch (a gift for Rosa’s high school graduation) is telling: she does not want to pass to her teenaged daughter, who is one year older than Serafina was when she was married in Sicily, the future. That would mean moving on from her hyperbolic and fictional romance with Rosario. It would mean accepting her daughter’s budding sexuality and desires. It would mean listening to the rumors that are more than idle chitchat. “I hate to start to remember, and then not remember...”: this small phrase is very telling because everything in this play is like a dream or something out of a nightmare or at least something a touch real, a touch absurd. Serafina is only out of touch because she is from another country and another time and another faith that promotes propriety, virtue, and ritual. She does not see that her own slovenly appearance (caused by grief and fear that the rumors of her husband are true) is the antithesis of what she believes she projects in her loyalty to his memory.
Then the young smaller-banana-truck driver Alvaro Mangiacavallo (whose last name, in Italian, means “Little Horse”; Williams’ nickname or Merlo was “Little Horse”) arrives, and Serafina’s life is thrown sideways. He has the body of her husband but the head of a clown, as Serafina remarks on several occasions. Alvaro is eager to please—he even gets a rose tattoo on his chest, right where Rosario (and, apparently, his lover) have one. He is a man with “three dependents,” already jilted by one fiancée (he bought he a zircon instead of a diamond), and oozing sensuality and despair. He can’t seem to stop crying—and, then, neither can she. What follows is Serafina’s coming-into-awareness of the ugly truth of a world to which she’s blindly dedicated her life, not understanding that the real loyalty she owes is to her own happiness rather than to the falsely-lionized dead. Faith and ritual only gets on so far before it’s time to face the music and use agency. This is ultimately a fast-paced play of many themes worth unpacking—religion, gender roles, racial and ethnic stereotypes, superstition, sexuality, love, and coming-of-age—and what I love most about The Rose Tattoo is that you can just keep pulling away the petals, so to speak, of each scene and moment, aiming to get to the core of what Williams was after—and are always satisfied by being just a little unsure.
The original Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including Best Play, and the 1955 film adaptation won three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Anna Magnani. Serafina is a juicy role to play—sensual, wild, beautiful, haggard. The conflict is very much internal and external all at once. I daresay one could pair The Rose Tattoo with The Crucible and do a fine study of the word “wild” as applied to women in American drama. To quote Abigail Williams from Arthur Miller’s play: “A wild thing may say wild things.” Compare this to what Serafina says to 15-year-old Rosa, who wants to go off with her newly-found sailor-boyfriend Jack: ““You wild, wild crazy thing.” Williams’ play may not be quite as feral and disastrous, nor political, as Miller’s 1952/53 allegory of McCarthyism, but there’s certainly much to be said about the yoking of madness-inducing love that sometimes turns both men and women into animals and beasts who must find a scrap of humanity and cling to it for redemption.
In his essay “The Meaning of The Rose Tattoo,” Williams insists the play “is the Dionysian element of human life, its mystery, its beauty, its significance.” He calls it “glittering quicksilver,” an elusive light shining on the back of a fleeting god who will not even turn to face us when we call “wait.” “Dionysus, being mystery, is never seen clearly,” Williams adds. That’s what always re-draws me to Williams and any great work of art: the ongoing, elusive mystery that drips though my fingers and reminds me of mortality. That’s why we must make most of what-is, rather than looking back through those rose-colored glasses. We cannot fill our houses with faceless dummies like seamstress Serafina, nor with the urn of ashes like that makes a home into a mausoleum. In an early version of The Rose Tattoo, “The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View,” the character Paul (later morphed into Mangiacavallo), tells Clara (Serafina’s precursor), “A woman can’t live in a grave.” Bingo. No one can, though we mere mortals seem determined, more often than not, to do so (as every great Modernist in particular has warned). We must live in a world of real, breathing bodies, where even mistakes are acceptable and more able to lead us to where we are meant to be. Just like roses, not everything beautiful lasts—but we can enjoy them while they do.
Tennessee Williams
New Directions—Drama
Unlocking the Beasts in the Cage: The Strange and Wild Beauty of Love
“There is nothing more beautiful than a gift between people!”
* * *
“A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.”
* * *
In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’ lapidary 1936 novel, there’s one particular quotation I always keep hovering in the back of my mind and I kept repeating it as I read The Rose Tattoo: “Sometimes one meets a woman who is a beast turning human.” In his 1949-50-penned play, The Rose Tattoo, Tennessee Williams presents wild women, wild men, wild landscapes, and wild rumors, culminating in one ferocious beast of a woman struggling against her supposedly “weak” human side—and eventually submitting to it without apology.
Part melodrama and part screwball comedy (one stage direction even suggests a scene should be acted like an old Charlie Chaplin film), Williams’ The Rose Tattoo is a slight departure from the playwright’s other works. To quote the protagonist: “Everything is too strange.” This play is not only comedic in a laugh-out-loud way (imagine doing that during A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie?!) but is also personal. Dedicated to Frank Merlo—Williams’ partner for 14 years who died of lung cancer in 1963—the play is also an absurd love letter to love itself, and, seemingly, the playwright’s own cathartic experiment in allowing himself to go beyond what audiences and critics expected from his works. This is “both comic and shocking,” as the stage directions note at one interval. So true. That’s this play.
The Rose Tattoo is resplendent with roses. The setting, props, and even names—Rosa, Rosario; the surname delle Rose—deeply-imbue the Gulf Coast milieu with rose-colored glasses. When I saw the 2019 Broadway revival, starring Marisa Tomei and Emun Elliott, the stage was covered in flamingos and projections of pale- or bright-pink skies for much of the play. This over-the-type setting, where symbols loom large and obvious, is nothing new for Williams. But the grotesque comedy, the sometimes heavy use of Italian, the discriminatory epithets used in reference to the Sicilian immigrant population, the fierce physicality of the events, the menagerie of actual animals cavorting (alongside children) on stage, and the rather risqué sexual nature of the play (one director of an Irish production was even arrested—you can look up why) all culminate into something just as wild as you’d expect from Williams but, also, more optimistic. Spoiler Alert: When was the last time you saw a Williams figure flee towards happiness, seemingly poised to get it, by the play’s finale?
The Rose Tattoo tells the story of Serafina delle Rose, a poor Sicilian immigrant who married a “baron,” as she often reminds others, and now lives in the U.S. with a sense of value, virtue, and violent love. She is committed to Rosario, her husband who drives a 10-ten banana truck (and apparently smuggles dope underneath); faithful to the Virgin Mary and her Catholic beliefs; and mother to Rosa with another child on the way. When Rosario dies unexpectedly and she miscarries their child, however, and rumors of Rosario’s infidelity spill out among the neighborhood gossips (including the witch or “The Strega”), Serafina won’t hear it. For three years, she mourns her husband, true to his image and chaste and virtuous. A statue of the Holy Mother robed in the sky and an urn of her husband’s ashes feel more real to her than her actual life, and daughter Rosa grows up like her father—wild and love-crazed. Serafina, once a respected and skilled seamstress, is now reduced to a dishabille, plump woman whom her own daughter calls “disgusting.” Like other Williams figures—Blanche DuBois, the Wingfields—Serafina is a woman working against time. That she can never seem to give her daughter a watch (a gift for Rosa’s high school graduation) is telling: she does not want to pass to her teenaged daughter, who is one year older than Serafina was when she was married in Sicily, the future. That would mean moving on from her hyperbolic and fictional romance with Rosario. It would mean accepting her daughter’s budding sexuality and desires. It would mean listening to the rumors that are more than idle chitchat. “I hate to start to remember, and then not remember...”: this small phrase is very telling because everything in this play is like a dream or something out of a nightmare or at least something a touch real, a touch absurd. Serafina is only out of touch because she is from another country and another time and another faith that promotes propriety, virtue, and ritual. She does not see that her own slovenly appearance (caused by grief and fear that the rumors of her husband are true) is the antithesis of what she believes she projects in her loyalty to his memory.
Then the young smaller-banana-truck driver Alvaro Mangiacavallo (whose last name, in Italian, means “Little Horse”; Williams’ nickname or Merlo was “Little Horse”) arrives, and Serafina’s life is thrown sideways. He has the body of her husband but the head of a clown, as Serafina remarks on several occasions. Alvaro is eager to please—he even gets a rose tattoo on his chest, right where Rosario (and, apparently, his lover) have one. He is a man with “three dependents,” already jilted by one fiancée (he bought he a zircon instead of a diamond), and oozing sensuality and despair. He can’t seem to stop crying—and, then, neither can she. What follows is Serafina’s coming-into-awareness of the ugly truth of a world to which she’s blindly dedicated her life, not understanding that the real loyalty she owes is to her own happiness rather than to the falsely-lionized dead. Faith and ritual only gets on so far before it’s time to face the music and use agency. This is ultimately a fast-paced play of many themes worth unpacking—religion, gender roles, racial and ethnic stereotypes, superstition, sexuality, love, and coming-of-age—and what I love most about The Rose Tattoo is that you can just keep pulling away the petals, so to speak, of each scene and moment, aiming to get to the core of what Williams was after—and are always satisfied by being just a little unsure.
The original Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including Best Play, and the 1955 film adaptation won three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Anna Magnani. Serafina is a juicy role to play—sensual, wild, beautiful, haggard. The conflict is very much internal and external all at once. I daresay one could pair The Rose Tattoo with The Crucible and do a fine study of the word “wild” as applied to women in American drama. To quote Abigail Williams from Arthur Miller’s play: “A wild thing may say wild things.” Compare this to what Serafina says to 15-year-old Rosa, who wants to go off with her newly-found sailor-boyfriend Jack: ““You wild, wild crazy thing.” Williams’ play may not be quite as feral and disastrous, nor political, as Miller’s 1952/53 allegory of McCarthyism, but there’s certainly much to be said about the yoking of madness-inducing love that sometimes turns both men and women into animals and beasts who must find a scrap of humanity and cling to it for redemption.
In his essay “The Meaning of The Rose Tattoo,” Williams insists the play “is the Dionysian element of human life, its mystery, its beauty, its significance.” He calls it “glittering quicksilver,” an elusive light shining on the back of a fleeting god who will not even turn to face us when we call “wait.” “Dionysus, being mystery, is never seen clearly,” Williams adds. That’s what always re-draws me to Williams and any great work of art: the ongoing, elusive mystery that drips though my fingers and reminds me of mortality. That’s why we must make most of what-is, rather than looking back through those rose-colored glasses. We cannot fill our houses with faceless dummies like seamstress Serafina, nor with the urn of ashes like that makes a home into a mausoleum. In an early version of The Rose Tattoo, “The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View,” the character Paul (later morphed into Mangiacavallo), tells Clara (Serafina’s precursor), “A woman can’t live in a grave.” Bingo. No one can, though we mere mortals seem determined, more often than not, to do so (as every great Modernist in particular has warned). We must live in a world of real, breathing bodies, where even mistakes are acceptable and more able to lead us to where we are meant to be. Just like roses, not everything beautiful lasts—but we can enjoy them while they do.
March 25, 2020
Another Tennessee classic, with all our favourite tropes: a ruined woman in disrepute courting madness, a family languishing in Southern Gothic dysfunction and charmingly problematic descriptions of people relating to different ethnicities ("Wild like a gypsy", "a distant shriek of Negro laughter", "He is one of those Mediterranean types that resemble glossy young bulls." - alright, Tenn, keep it calm, keep it casual - he also refers to the protagonist, Serafina, as if she was a bull multiple times to, as well as a matador... That's Spain, bro, not Sicily? Maybe he was just on one).
This play even precedes Journey to Italy, a 1954 film that, when I tried to watch, I found myself unable to due to its constant bizarre and offensive depictions of Italians, in their own country. I had never heard of the term 'dago' before this play, and was interested to find out it basically applies to any Spanish, Italian or Portuguese speaker and is a derivation of Diego. Onya, Tenn, for highlighting discrimination towards the Italian community in '50s Gulf Coast America. I also adore Rosario delle Rose, with a rose tattoo, a silk shirt made in a rose colour, and a daughter called Rosa, as a character. Strong brand.
I kid around, but of course, Williams is a formidable writer with an acute understanding of human nature and an in depth empathy for his characters. He guides you sharply in your understanding of each character's motivations. "We must understand her profound unconscious response to this sudden contact with distress as acute as her own" comes to mind, re: Alvaro and Serafina's first scene.
Speaking of that scene, for me, I saw parallels with Midsommar, a recent film, where the primal scream/blood-letting of emotion is felt by both protagonist and a spectator, the latter triggered by the former's honesty. Alvaro, sobbing, allows Serafina the space to feel her own deep pain over Rosario.
Anyways, another starkly humanising portrayal of a woman down on her luck, told without a gawking freakshow or overly moralistic framework to it. Like I said, a TW classic. I loved the evocation of Our Lady to which Serafina prayed constantly for release from her own misery; a matriarchal spectre of purity neither she nor poor Rosa could possibly live up to given their own humanity.
It was a fantastic, slim read, with an eloquent and thoughtful foreword by the author which calls on you to ponder how much human beings hurt each other, and what we truly want from one another.
What I now want because of Tennessee's evocative descriptions of this play:
- a rose silk blouse (ordered by a strumpet to the tune of $25 damn dollars on the night of my death)
- rose oil in my hair
- Sicilian spumante (spelled Spumanti throughout the play to my extreme confusion)
- for someone to piss me off so much I can refer to them as "not worth the powder it'd take to blow them to Hell"
- obviously, a rose tattoo
Songs to pair this with:
- Green Arrow ~ Yo La Tengo
- Gnossiennes: 1. Lent ~ Kaori Muraji
- Sweet Little Lie ~ Nils Frahm
- Highway Anxiety ~ William Tyler
This play even precedes Journey to Italy, a 1954 film that, when I tried to watch, I found myself unable to due to its constant bizarre and offensive depictions of Italians, in their own country. I had never heard of the term 'dago' before this play, and was interested to find out it basically applies to any Spanish, Italian or Portuguese speaker and is a derivation of Diego. Onya, Tenn, for highlighting discrimination towards the Italian community in '50s Gulf Coast America. I also adore Rosario delle Rose, with a rose tattoo, a silk shirt made in a rose colour, and a daughter called Rosa, as a character. Strong brand.
ALVARO: Naw, you make a mistake! It's always for everybody the time of roses! The rose is the heart of the world like the heart is the--heart of the--body.
I kid around, but of course, Williams is a formidable writer with an acute understanding of human nature and an in depth empathy for his characters. He guides you sharply in your understanding of each character's motivations. "We must understand her profound unconscious response to this sudden contact with distress as acute as her own" comes to mind, re: Alvaro and Serafina's first scene.
Speaking of that scene, for me, I saw parallels with Midsommar, a recent film, where the primal scream/blood-letting of emotion is felt by both protagonist and a spectator, the latter triggered by the former's honesty. Alvaro, sobbing, allows Serafina the space to feel her own deep pain over Rosario.
ALVARO: I like a woman that laughs with all her heart.
SERAFINA: And a woman that cries with her heart?
ALVARO: I like everything that a woman does with her heart.
Anyways, another starkly humanising portrayal of a woman down on her luck, told without a gawking freakshow or overly moralistic framework to it. Like I said, a TW classic. I loved the evocation of Our Lady to which Serafina prayed constantly for release from her own misery; a matriarchal spectre of purity neither she nor poor Rosa could possibly live up to given their own humanity.
It was a fantastic, slim read, with an eloquent and thoughtful foreword by the author which calls on you to ponder how much human beings hurt each other, and what we truly want from one another.
What I now want because of Tennessee's evocative descriptions of this play:
- a rose silk blouse (ordered by a strumpet to the tune of $25 damn dollars on the night of my death)
- rose oil in my hair
- Sicilian spumante (spelled Spumanti throughout the play to my extreme confusion)
- for someone to piss me off so much I can refer to them as "not worth the powder it'd take to blow them to Hell"
- obviously, a rose tattoo
Songs to pair this with:
- Green Arrow ~ Yo La Tengo
- Gnossiennes: 1. Lent ~ Kaori Muraji
- Sweet Little Lie ~ Nils Frahm
- Highway Anxiety ~ William Tyler
June 25, 2025
Tennessee just gets me and I get him.
June 12, 2025
all the intensity of a life — love, death, loss, grief, birth, love again — in one setting, four days.
roses in the hair of a widow, rose turned to ashes. rosario, rosa, rose. innocence (or naivety?) comes and goes as easily as the flower. tattoos may be forever but passion sure isn't!!!
truth is fragmentary, at best: we love and betray each other not in quite the same breath but in two breaths that occur in fairly close sequence. but the fact that passion occurred in passing, that it then declined into a more familiar sense of indifference, should not be regarded as proof of its inconsequence. and this is the very truth that drama wishes to bring us...
roses in the hair of a widow, rose turned to ashes. rosario, rosa, rose. innocence (or naivety?) comes and goes as easily as the flower. tattoos may be forever but passion sure isn't!!!
truth is fragmentary, at best: we love and betray each other not in quite the same breath but in two breaths that occur in fairly close sequence. but the fact that passion occurred in passing, that it then declined into a more familiar sense of indifference, should not be regarded as proof of its inconsequence. and this is the very truth that drama wishes to bring us...
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews