A Rose By No Other Name
Must See Performance Here
by Eonn Skye
May 6, 2010

Such is the power of this performance engaging the audience with stark realism expressed in authentic dialect that it feels we are living along with the character as her reminiscences about her lifetime are exposed right before our eyes. It’s moving and powerful.

Westerwelle’s performance is a departure from her popular comic act in Portland. She inhabits the skin of the character with a powerful magic and intensity. The actress sits on a bench throughout the two hour production talking about her life, those who peopled it and the political events that took place over her 80 year life.

Rose takes us through her life which is a travelogue through the last 80 years of Jewish history and through the horrifying life of a childhood involving Cossacks, Communism and the Nazi devastation.  She cries as she describes the loss of her daughter Esther and her husband, not comprehending why she survived, and at times wishes she hadn’t. 

Rather than accepting assistance in a displaced person’s camp, she jumps the train with her American Zionist lover.  But rather than a life in Palestine, they make their life in America, one might have thought “happily ever after”.  However in the second act we become witness to what happens as her new children grow up living out dreams Rose never fulfilled, but with enormous familial and political complications and challenges with which Rose struggles to come to terms.

The play is a howling, rousing and often heartfelt one person show performing here. The first performance in 1999 at the Royal Theatre, London cast Olympia Dukakis and won nomination as Best New Play from Laurence Oliver Theater. It was later produced in New York’s Lincoln Center with Dukakis reprising her role.
Triangle Productions staged the initial Palm Springs performance at the Tolerance Center in Palm Desert. This new facility provides historic exhibitions of worldwide genocide and the atrocities of intolerance. The small theater provided perfect intimacy for the show.

The director and producer of Rose was Donald Horn who started triangle productions! In 1989. Horn is a playwright with over 12 plays and is a published author: Crumbs of Love (a memoir available Amazon.com) and Agapi Mou (My Love) a novel about the Greek island Zakynthos.

Friday 730 Sat 240 and Sun 2pm at PS Women’s Club 314 So. Cahuilla $20 www.tritro.org. Box Office 760-880-5668