Posted on: Friday, March 4, 2005
STAGE REVIEW
Growing old with poignancy
By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic
One of the drawbacks in living to an advanced age is the potential for outlasting one's relevancy.
"Rose" is drawn from the same well of holocaust horror, but takes an interesting turn in its second act by measuring the cost of survivorship. The story focuses on an 80-year-old Jewish woman who evades the pogroms of her Ukrainian village by escaping to Warsaw, where she successfully hides from the Nazis, only to experience an aborted immigration to Israel.
As the tumultuous action nears the end of its first act, Rose is aboard a train taking her back to the "old country," as a Jewish-American sailor shouts for her to jump into his arms.
That teaser irresistibly pulls the audience back from intermission. Rose jumps, lands in the Atlantic City boardwalk and then Miami Beach.
It's a life filled with violence and unimaginable change, but as the play opens, Rose is 80 and preparing to sit shivah, the Jewish mourning ritual, for an 8-year-old girl who has been shot in the head. Who she is and what she means to Rose is not explained until the play's conclusion, but Rose's personal situation is unsolvable.
"I'm 80 years old. I find that unforgivable, and suddenly it's a millennium and I stink of the past century, but what can I do?"
As the play unfolds, Rose's past becomes less important. She has survived without hoping for a future, but finds herself inexplicably living in a world that no longer seems to understand or value her experience.
"Rose" premiered in May 1999 at the Royal National Theatre London and was produced in America starring Olympia Dukakis.
Hormann-Alper takes the stage with the careful gait of the aged. Her character is a woman made irritable by her struggle through what she believes to have been a pointless life, but seasons her mood with the irony that fills much of Jewish humor.
Believing that asking questions that can't be answered is the greatest Jewish contribution to the world, Rose is in a unique situation because of her age. "We had an ozone layer then. It's a shame no one told us. We could have enjoyed it."
Memory blurs as Rose wonders whether her images of Cossacks came from experience or from "Fiddler on the Roof." But she's sure on one point — when she experienced her first period and her first pogrom in the same month, she correctly supposed that her childhood was over.
Hormann-Alper delivers a neatly modulated performance that gives variety to two full acts of dialogue. What ultimately emerges is a character study drawn against a history lesson, and a realization that Rose's tragedy is not what she survived but how she will continue to go forward.
That's the central torment in "Rose," a one-woman show written by Martin Sherman. Sherman is the author of "Bent," a play about Nazi persecution of homosexuals that gained the author a great deal of attention and success.
'ROSE,' A ONE-WOMAN PLAY BY MARTIN SHERMAN
The current Readers' Theatre production at Army Community Theatre stars Sylvia Hormann-Alper and is adapted and directed by Vanita Rae Smith.
Sylvia Hormann-Alper
