Eros & the Widow

The Rose Tattoo. No one falls in love on the modern stage, and it's a pity. Love lends an almost old-fashioned sweetness, tenderness and charm to this glowingly warm Broadway revival of a Tennessee Williams play that first opened in 1950.

Love alone does not govern the play, for it is also a drama about passion as a prime element, a life force that no more obeys the laws of convention than a tidal wave heeds the shore line. The heroine (Maureen Stapleton) is a kind of common woman's Phaedra. Just as the Greek Queen went mad in her passion for her stepson Hippolytus, this Sicilian widow near New Orleans goes mad in her passion for the memory of her dead truck-driver husband. When a young sailor lights the fires of love in the eyes of her 15-year-old daughter (Maria Tucci), the widow turns fiercely moralistic. Then the image of her late husband appears, another truck driver (Harry Guardino) with an identical rose tattoo on his chest, and she abandons herself to the power of Eros.

The seriocomic man-woman fencing between Stapleton and Guardino is the special delight of the evening. Here are two people ravenously hungry for each other and yet honestly anxious to cherish each other's dignity. In his most direct play, Williams makes a sensuous sonnet out of his central love symbol: "The rose is the heart of the world."

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