wrote, “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 this play as a monument to that happiness, a house built of images and words for that happiness to live in. But in that happiness, there is the long, inescapable heritage of the painful and perplexed like the dark corners of a big room.”


An enormous amount of research has gone into the preparation for this production. I studied the historical records of Sicilian immigrant communities in the Gulf states in the 1950s. I researched Sicilian folk music and the worship of the Black Madonna. I familiarized myself with the cultural and racial diversity of the Gulf regions. I learned Sicilian spells to ward off the evil eye. If reading a Williams biography is of interest to audience members, I would most highly recommend John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. It was an invaluable resource in preparing to direct the play.


TS: This play requires a huge cast. Are you employing doubling or even tripling in your production? TC: We have a company of 21 actors—and that is after I cut some characters out of the original text! I love this play for so many reasons, but one among them is that it is peopled primarily by women. So often, plays are written with mainly male characters. Shakespeare, for example, only has an average of three women characters in each of his plays. Here, that ratio is reversed. There are only a handful of male characters, and the vast majority of characters are female.


I decided against doubling or tripling in this production. The reason for that choice is that it felt important to get a sense of the community surrounding Serafina. The play’s construction is quite odd—the second half consists mainly of two huge scenes between Serafina and Alvaro. The first half is a series of confrontations between Serafina and various denizens of her community. Several characters make a single appearance in the play and are not seen again. Were I to have doubled or tripled the casting of the actors, audiences wouldn’t get a true sense of the multiplicity of the world surrounding Serafina, nor of the unusual way the play is constructed.•


Emun Elliot and Marisa Tomei in The Rose Tattoo


THE ROSE TATTOO UPSTAGE GUIDE


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