THE ROSE TATTOO: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’S LOVE-PLAY TO THE WORLD


“The Rose Tattoo was my love-play to the world. It was permeated with the happy young love for Frankie and I dedicated the book to him, saying: ‘To Frankie in Return for Sicily.’” —Tennessee Williams


Europe, and they traveled to Sicily, where Williams met Merlo’s extended family. Hearing stories of passionate Sicilians sparked his imagination. Williams wrote an 8-page outline for a play called Stornello (which translates to a short Italian street song), about a widowed Sicilian seamstress who makes her home into a shrine to her dead husband, shutting herself and her daughter away from love or sex. Williams showed the outline to his agent, Audrey Wood, and director Elia Kazan—who had directed Streetcar and was one of the most influential directors in America. Kazan was not enthusiastic, and for a time, Williams abandoned the idea.


“During the past two years I have been, for the first time in my life, happy and at home with someone and I think of [The Rose Tattoo] as a monument to that happiness, a house built of images and words for that happiness to live in.”


Williams settled into a stable relationship with Merlo in Key West, Florida. In 1949, he returned to his idea and wrote the first draft of The Rose Tattoo, which focused on the Sicilian seamstress, her husband, and her daughter. He set the play on the Gulf Coast with its Italian immigrant communities and Creole culture, a change from the Southern milieus and characters of his previous plays. Williams saw this as “a giant step forward,” but he worried how the play would be received.


“The play is probably too subjective, an attempt to externalize an experience that was too much of my own.” —Williams on the first draft of The Rose Tattoo)


First Edition cover of The Rose Tattoo


Tennessee Williams was facing a creative slump in 1948. Following a meteoric rise with two Broadway hits—The Glass Menagerie in ‘45 and A Streetcar Named Desire in ‘47—the critics dismissed his next play, Summer and Smoke, and the failure hit hard.


“Talent died in me from over-exposure. I’m not going to hit another jack-pot any time soon. Until the heart finds a new song and the power to sing it.”


The heart awakened one night in 1948 when Williams ran into Frank Merlo in a deli on Lexington Avenue. The men had met casually in Provincetown the previous year, but now, a deeper connection took root. A few months later, Williams took Merlo to


4 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


Kazan liked the new draft, calling it “a kind of comic-grotesque Mass said in praise of the Male Force.” He provided detailed suggestions, most significantly to focus the action on widow Serafina and visitor Alvaro Mangiacavallo, which Williams followed closely in his next rewrite. His happiness with Merlo contributed to the play’s celebratory ending.


“I have just now completed what I think is the best scene in any of my long plays, the first scene between Pepina [ed. note: the original name for Serafina] and Alvaro. It suddenly came out of the bushes!”


Producer Cheryl Crawford took on the play for the 1950-51 Broadway season, but Kazan passed, citing schedule conflicts, so Williams hired a young director, Danny Mann. Although Serafina was written for Italian actress Anna Magnani, she turned down the production.(She would later star in the 1955 film version.) Williams chose Maureen Stapleton, 25, Irish, and at the time an unknown, for Serafina, while Eli Wallach, also a non-Italian, played Mangiacavallo. After a month-long tryout in Chicago, the play opened on Broadway in February 1951.


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