INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR TRIP CULLMAN


Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with Director Trip Cullman about his work on The Rose Tattoo.


Ted Sod: Why did you want to direct Tennessee Williams’s 1951 play The Rose Tattoo? What would you say the play is about? How do you expect contemporary audiences will relate to it? Trip Cullman: Tennessee Williams is one of my favorite playwrights. In grad school, I directed A Streetcar Named Desire for my thesis production. I have always admired the poetry of his language, but for The Rose Tattoo, Williams wished to subsume the poetry of his dialogue so that the expressivity of his artistic sensibility was borne primarily by the visual. The play’s dialogue is quite earthbound and quotidian for Williams, yet the play is filled to the brim with visual symbolism—the goat expressing the Dionysian or water imagery expressing feminine mysticism, for example. Williams wrote, “This was a play built of movement and color, almost as much as an abstract painting is made of them.” The original production of the play—as well as the film version— were presented quite naturalistically. Williams said, “The Rose Tattoo should have been a riotous and radiant thing, but the spatial limitations of the stage and the limits of time, etc., put it into a straitjacket and only about two-thirds of its potential appeal came through.” Perhaps somewhat sentimentally, I am striving with this production to give Williams the highly symbolic, visually poetic production of his work he always dreamed of but was never able to see realized in his lifetime.


For me, The Rose Tattoo is about the struggle between renunciation and connection, between living in the past versus living in the present, between adherence to tradition and liberation into self-fulfillment unbound by social conventions. Serafina is a new arrival to the United States and brings with her the strictures and mores of her traditional Sicilian heritage. As such, in mourning the husband she idolized, she calcifies her life force—defining her existence wholly by eschewing desire, burying her sexuality in an apotheosis of grief. Her asceticism is so extreme, it becomes eroticized. She eroticizes the memory of her husband to such an extreme that she cannot allow for any carnality in the here and now. “To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion,” Serafina says. “Now I lie on it with dreams, with memories only!” When she meets Alvaro and learns the truth about her husband, she finally is able to unlock her heart and embrace life again. What he accomplishes, Williams wrote about Alvaro’s love for Serafina, “is her escape from the urn of ashes and her reconcilement with life!” The Rose Tattoo illuminates the tremendous power of female sexuality—especially when liberated from patriarchal mores.


Ultimately, the play is about the transformative and liberating power of love. Williams called it “my love-play to the world.” The great majority of Williams’s plays end tragically. This play has a joyous ending. It is a hard-won happiness, but given the deeply troubled times we currently live in, my hope is that audiences will leave the theatre buoyed by the play’s affirmation of the essential life force and capacity for love in us all.


Trip Cullman Photo by Daniel Rader


TS: What research was necessary for you to do in order to direct The Rose Tattoo? Will you share some of what you learned from the preparation you did? TC: Williams dedicated The Rose Tattoo to his lover Frank Merlo “in return for Sicily.” Following the enormous success of Streetcar, Williams had suffered a critical disappointment with Summer and Smoke. He and Merlo escaped to Italy and lived there for a year, a period Williams recalled in later years as the happiest time of his life. His nickname for Merlo was “Little Horse,” which became Alvaro’s last name in The Rose Tattoo—Mangiacavallo, meaning “eat a horse.” The unhappiness of Williams’s childhood and young adult life—filled with the mental instability of his sister and mother, his absent father, and the repression and shame around his sexuality—was washed away in the bliss of his love affair with Merlo. And this liberation became the underlying inspiration for Serafina’s liberation by Alvaro in The Rose Tattoo. Elia Kazan wrote to Williams that The Rose Tattoo “might be read as a massive autobiography…as naked as the best confessions.”


I like to think of The Rose Tattoo as perhaps Williams’s most personal work, and the character of Serafina as his most personal creative reflection of himself. It was through his fulfillment in his relationship with Merlo that this poetic self-mirroring was made possible. Williams


6 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


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