• Rose

9/25/20 (Fri)

Revival of Martin Sherman’s one-woman show, performed by Maureen Lipman and being streamed worldwide. The show was originally written for her back in 1999, but she never got around to it; it ended up being done at London’s National Theatre with an acclaimed performance by Olympia Dukakis. Presumably having nothing else to do stage-wise at the moment with all the theaters in London closed, she’s finally taken on the role, performing alone in an empty theater for live broadcast. One positive side to the wait is that she’s actually closer to the age of the character now.

We meet Rose as she sits shiva alone for a young girl who was shot through the head. She tells the story of her traumatic past as she drifts from city to city – Russian pogroms in a Ukrainian shtetl to Nazi persecution in a Warsaw ghetto, then via the Exodus on to a brief moment in Palestine before being almost immediately rerouted. She loses her husband and three-year-old child amid the appalling situation in Europe, but somehow manages to get to America, where she again drifts from Atlantic City to Arizona to Miami and from husband to husband. She eventually finds herself manager of a hotel, realizing the American dream even as she recounts it with jaundiced memory. It’s a story of survival against all odds. The startling encounter with her first husband in the desert was especially memorable, and the identity of the dead girl for whom she is sitting shiva comes as a shock, though the implication that the Jews have become just as inhuman as the Nazis is not very convincing in the form presented here, even in the context of her heated argument with her grandson over the state (in both meanings) of Israel.

The story was sentimental at times but never less than engaging, especially in Lipman’s dry delivery, leavened with Yiddish-style irony and humor. She performs the entire play seated on a wooden bench but manages to sustain our interest through her inflections and unhurried manner, like a grandmother relating the story to her family. The play covers a vast period of time and huge changes in the world that Rose knows, from the tiny Jewish village of her youth to her gay grandson, which she observes with a world-weary, shrug-of-the-shoulders stance that ultimately gives way to tears toward the show’s end. A similar passing was suggested in the shrinking shivas throughout The Lehman Trilogy, and the poignant theme of the inevitability of change also recalled Fiddler on the Roof, which Rose references by name. Director Scott Le Crass uses video imagery on the back wall at certain points throughout the show, but it was hard to see in this format and seemed unnecessary anyway given Rose’s vivid descriptions of each location. I imagine the show would be even more effective in a proper theater with the actress addressing us directly, but this is one of the more successful filmed plays. Recommended.