Tennessee Williams put a little bit of everything into his play “The Rose Tattoo.”
“It has sex, it has fights, it has love, it has drama and it has a goat,” said Amber Gibson, a sophomore majoring in theatre and English who is performing in the play.
The University of Alabama theatre department brings it all to the Gallaway Theatre stage in Rowand-Johnson Hall tonight at 7:30. “The Rose Tattoo” will also have shows at 7:30 every night through Sunday, except on Thursday, with an extra showing on Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12 for students, $15 for seniors, faculty and staff and $18 for adults.
Serafina De La Rosa, the play’s protagonist, suffers two tragedies simultaneously at the beginning of the play. The action of “The Rose Tattoo,” which was Tennessee Williams’ first comedy, focuses on her coming out of the depression she suffers following these tragedies.
“It’s been a complete and total emotional rollercoaster for me,” said Jessica Knight, who plays Serafina and is a second-year graduate student working on her MFA in acting. “It’s definitely pushed me to emotional levels I’ve never been to before.”
Not only does this play bring a lot of emotion to the stage, it brings a lot of physicality. During the show Serafina goes after people with a broom, attacks a priest and her neighbor, El Brujh, has to wrangle a live goat on more than one occasion.
“It’s a surprisingly physical show,” said Jeff Horger, a first-year graduate student working on his MFA in acting. “We don’t break into fist fights or anything like that but there are some rapid movements.”
All of the actors agreed that the physicality of the show was one of the most difficult aspects of getting the show together in the short six weeks they have had.
However, Edmund Williams, professor of theatre and director of the show, thought that making the accents authentic and believable was the most difficult part because it was so essential to the play’s action.
The play takes the audience back to the 1940s in a small Cuban community in Miami, an adaptation to Tennessee Williams’ original setting in a Sicilian community in the Gulf Coast.
This was not the only adaptation that Edmund Williams made. Original productions had two intermissions, but he adapted the script to only have one. He was careful not to lose anything from the original, which was filled with emotion and comedy.
“It is, as they say, from the pen of the master,” Williams said. “We all know Tennessee Williams; we all admire Tennessee Williams.”
This play is one of the lesser-known plays that he wrote, which was a big part of the reason Williams decided to bring “The Rose Tattoo” to the University.
“It’s a play I’ve never done before; it’s a play that’s never been done at the University of Alabama before,” he said. “You don’t get to see this particular play very often.”
Bringing this play to the University of Alabama was not an easy task for the theatre department. Knight said it is the coming together of all of the crews that has made this play great.
“Everybody just came together and worked like crazy, and I’m ready to see it all just come together,” she said.
This production will be the regional premiere of “The Rose Tattoo” and the only opportunity to see it with the adaptations that Edmund Williams added to it.
