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| Regina Baff, Sylvia Miles, Ron Rifkin. |
Rosebloom was
originally staged at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where it won the Los
Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. The New York critics, however, were
seriously unimpressed. The nearly plotless play presents a psychologically
impaired middle-class Jewish family—a preening, neurotic woman in her mid-40s
named Sylvie (Sylvia Miles); her mentally and physically challenged son, Mark
(Ron Rifkin), confined to a wheelchair; and the son’s pot-smoking, screwball
wife, Enola Gay (Regina Baff), named for the plane that dropped the A-bomb on
Hiroshima. They talkatively await and then greet the arrival of Rosebloom
(Harold Gary), the family patriarch who is returning home from a 26-year prison
term for murder.
Much of the play is written in dense, literary,
pause-filled, undramatic, drifting language, combining inner monologues with
actual dialogue. The style suggested Edward Albee to most reviewers, but some saw
traces of Pinter, Joyce, Pirandello, and Capote. Fantasy and fact, dialogue and
asides, flashes of violence, frequent profanity, and bitterness and sarcasm,
were principal ingredients in this heavily symbolic work.
Favorable comments were scattered
in the coverage of Clive Barnes (“a strangely original play”), Walter Kerr (“much
of this is intelligently, persuasively, written”); and Douglas Watt (“a chilling
comic tour de force as jumpy as a Schoenberg quartet”). Still, Barnes thought
it “too ornate,” Kerr said it was directionless, and Watt felt author Harvey Perr
“outsmarted himself.”
Among the more acid-tipped words were those of John
Simon, who detected a latent homosexual theme in the writing, which he wished
the playwright could have dealt with more honestly. His verdict was that Rosebloom was “the most repulsively
pretentious piece of pseudo-art of the year.”
Jered Barclay’s staging and the four player ensemble were
generally praised, Jack Kroll, for example, referring to the production as “an
evening of sharp, gutsy New York acting.”
