Barnett, David. "The Rose Tattoo and Camino Real (1951 and 1946–1953)." The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014. 91–106. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472515452.0012>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 03:19 UTC. Copyright © Brenda Murphy 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER 6 THE ROSE TATTOO AND CAMINO REAL (1951 AND 1946 – 1953) Symbolism was always an important element in Williams ’ s writing, whether poetry, fi ction, or drama, but in two plays from the early 1950s, he entered into a symbolic aesthetic with an exuberance beyond that of his other plays. Th e Rose Tattoo (1951) is rife with symbolism, a unique case in which the rose that is usually associated with Williams ’ s sister in a pathetic or tragic way is instead associated with a vibrant, healthy sexuality. In his Foreword to Camino Real (1953), he wrote that “ more than any other work that I have done, this play has seemed like the construction of another world, a separate existence ” (NSE: 68). Th e symbolism he used to create it, he said, has “ only one legitimate purpose ” in a play, which is “ to say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words ” (NSE: 70). Modern Fabliau: The Rose Tattoo While vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1947, Williams had a brief aff air with Frank Merlo, a young Italian- American 11 years his junior, which aff ected both of them more than they expected. By October, Merlo had moved in with Williams, beginning the 14-year relationship that was the longest and most stable of his life. Th e Rose Tattoo , which Williams dedicated “ To Frank, in exchange for Sicily, ” was very much inspired by the early years of their loving and exuberantly sexual relationship, especially the summers they spent together in Italy. It is one of Williams ’ s few comedies, based on the medieval fabliau, or bawdy tale, which also underlies Giovanni Boccaccio ’ s Decameron and Geoff rey Chaucer ’ s Canterbury 91 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 9911 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:360:28:36 AAMM The Theatre of Tennessee Williams Tales . Th e play is full of earthy, simple humor, with a group of peasant characters Williams refers to as clowns, a goat that is chased through the yard at strategic times to emphasize the sexuality in the scene, physical humor involving a girdle and a condom, and broad sexual puns about driving truckloads of bananas. In form, Th e Rose Tattoo (1951) is what literary theorist Northrop Frye refers to as a Normal Comedy, in which a fl awed old order is disrupted by a threat that is often sexual, but a freer, more natural and more inclusive new order replaces it in the end. As the play begins, Serafi na delle Rose, a seamstress, waits for her husband Rosario, the banana-truck driver, to come home. She wears a rose in her hair and her “ voluptuous fi gure is sheathed in pale rose silk , ” but she also sits with “ plump dignity ” and is wearing a “ tight girdle ” (P1: 657). Serafi na is a former peasant who is proud of having married a baron back in Sicily. She is also inordinately proud of having made love with her husband every night of her married life, believing that her husband has never been touched by anyone but her. Th is pride suff ers a great fall, and the constraints that have channeled Serafi na ’ s sexuality within her marriage collapse. Rosario is shot because the bananas are hiding a load of drugs he is hauling for the mafi a. Against the local priest ’ s orders, Serafi na has him cremated and keeps the ashes in a shrine, along with the statue of the Blessed Virgin, to whom she prays. Th ree years later, she has become slovenly, no longer wears a girdle, and even goes outside in a dirty slip. She also locks up her daughter Rosa, who has fallen in love with Jack, a young sailor, and takes her clothes so that she can ’ t go out to meet him. Th is state of prolonged grief and unnaturally sexless gloom is relieved when Serafi na discovers that her husband was not the ideal lover she believed him to be, but that he was having an aff air. In Act 3 she acknowledges her own sexuality when she sleeps with Alvaro Mangiacavallo ( “ eat a horse ” – Williams ’ s nickname for Frank Merlo was “ the little horse ” ). Alvaro, who is the humorous mirror image of Rosario, her “ husband ’ s body with the head of a clown ” (704), also drives a banana truck, and has a rose tattooed on his chest to match Rosario ’ s. After Jack promises in front of the statue of the Virgin to respect Rosa ’ s innocence, Serafi na allows them to go out together. 92 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 9922 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:360:28:36 AAMM The Rose Tattoo and Camino Real (1951 and 1946 – 1953) At the end of the play, Serafi na has accepted Alvaro as her lover despite his clownish face and behavior, and, because she momentarily sees a rose tattoo on her own breast, she believes that she has conceived a baby with him that will be some compensation for the miscarriage she suff ered when Rosario died. She allows Rosario ’ s ashes to blow away, and lets Rosa, who plans one afternoon with Jack in a hotel before he ships out, to “ go to the boy ” (737), wearing clothes from her wedding trousseau. Th us a new, far less constrained and falsely idealized order is established in which natural sexual desire is acknowledged. Serafi na even sheds her girdle, which she had put on for her date with Alvaro, but takes it off because it is so uncomfortable. Williams intended Th e Rose Tattoo for his friend, the legendary Italian actor Anna Magnani. She toyed with the idea of playing Serafi na, but decided that her English was not up to a sustained stage role. Magnani did play the role in the 1955 fi lm opposite Burt Lancaster as Alvaro, but the role in the 1951 Broadway production was played by another of Williams ’ s close friends, Maureen Stapleton, with Eli Wallach as Alvaro. Both play and fi lm, directed by Daniel Mann, were successful, with the Broadway production running more than 300 performances. A fi tting celebration of the relationship that inspired it, part of the fi lm was shot in the backyard of Williams and Merlo ’ s house in Key West. Romantics in the Real World: Camino Real Camino Real (1953) was a deeply meaningful play for Williams, a bohemian cri de coeur , more self-revelatory than anything he had yet written. While Th e Glass Menagerie drew directly on his family, and Battle of Angels and A Streetcar Named Desire refl ected some of his important values and confl icts, Camino was, as he said, “ nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and world that I live in ” (P1: 743). He described it in an interview as “ a prayer for the wild of heart kept in cages ” (C: 32) and thought of it as a representation of the plight of the romantic bohemian in the mid-twentieth century, with its oppressive political, social, and moral institutions and codes. 93 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 9933 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:360:28:36 AAMM The Theatre of Tennessee Williams Th is important play was 8 years in the making, and it underwent many changes along the way. It began during Williams ’ s trip to Mexico in 1945, with what he called his “ Were-wolf ” play, “ Cabeza de Lobo, ” which was focused on the arrival of a young man in a Mexican village, where he encounters a werewolf and lifts the veil of a girl named Esmeralda, traces of which survive in Camino Real . In January of 1946, Williams was back in New Orleans, shaping this germ into a one-act play called Ten Blocks on the Camino Real . In an unpublished foreword to the play, he explained that he had been inspired by a train ride through Mexico, where he witnessed the “ blue dusk in the village . like the essential myth of a poem ” (Parker 1998: 45), the street people, the inscription “ Kilroy was here ” written on a wall, and two characters resembling Jacques Casanova and Marguerite Gautier (Camille) on the train. Toward the end of the month, Williams told James Laughlin, his publisher at New Directions, that he would soon send him a manuscript of the play, which included Oliver Winemiller, the male prostitute from his story “ One Arm ” (1948), as protagonist, as well as Proust ’ s homosexual masochist, the Baron de Charlus, and Don Quixote as characters. At the end of February, he sent a version to Audrey Wood and received a not very enthusiastic reply. Th irty years later in his Memoirs , he wrote that she had called him on the phone and said stridently, “ about that play you sent me . put it away, don ’ t let anybody see it. ” He said that “ her phone call may have prevented me from making a very, very beautiful play out of Camino Real instead of the striking but fl awed piece which it fi nally turned into several years later ” (M: 101).