In Renaissance Theaterworks’ ‘Rose,’ the Kennedy family matriarch faces a crisis
Talking through her life with an unseen biographer, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (portrayed by Linda Reiter), mother of a president and senators, defends the differences in how she treated her sons and her daughters.
“I taught them life is a matter of compromises. And it is women who make them.”
In Renaissance Theaterworks’ new production of Laurence Leamer’s oneactor play “Rose,” one of America’s most prominent Irish Catholic women sounds remarkably like a European queen, powerful yet constrained at the time, clinging above all to a code and a role in the face of tragedies and her husband’s infidelities.
Leamer, whose books about this famous family include “The Kennedy Women,” tapped many hours of interviews with Rose made by a former biographer as source material for this play.
“Rose” catches her in 1969 at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, about a week after the Chappaquiddick incident, which resulted in the death of automobile passenger Mary Jo Kopechne and unending questions for the driver, Edward (Ted) Kennedy, who would later receive a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.
On the day of the play, Teddy, as his mother always calls her youngest son, has gone sailing solo but is delayed in returning. Her fear about what may have happened to him (or what he may have done) breaks through her reserve multiple times.
Her inner steel and her observant Catholicism (represented here by Reiter frequently handling rosary beads) have seen her through the assassinations of JFK and Bobby, and the deaths of two other children in airplane accidents. But two things threaten to undo her emotionally: the lobotomy her husband arranged for mentally disabled daughter Rosemary, and Teddy’s crisis.
(Rosemary, virtually incapacitated after that operation, would spend most of the rest of her life at the St. Coletta institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin.)
Reiter gives us a flinty Rose, nostalgic in reminiscences about her charming father but honest enough to point out how he blocked her desires. This is a play that hurls a lot of biographical information at the audience, but Reiter’s diction and delivery are impeccable and nary a word is lost. Her phone conversations with daughters and daughters-in-law demonstrate how she promulgates the Kennedy way.
Projected images designed by Smooch (John) Medina enhance her stories, as does Josh Schmidt’s eerie sound design. Elizabeth Margolius directed this production.
While pre-Vatican II, circle-the-wagons Catholicism has shaped and sometimes warped her life, Rose continues to preach it to others. But she confesses to us, under the influence of Jackie O, that she’s now reading Greek tragedy.