Wednesday, April 7, 2010

ROSE: Willamette Week Review!!!!

Gnarled hands pushed firmly into her knees, Rose leans forward, hunching over the wooden bench that she will stay perched on throughout her monologue, the thick muscles in her jaw pulling and pushing her lips dramatically as she tells the sorrowful tale of living in Warsaw during the Holocaust and afterward as a refugee, with her husband being marched off by Nazis and young daughter shot before her eyes in between. Amid anguished recollections of her tortured past, Rose (Wendy Westerwelle) graces the audience with short bursts of comedic relief, chuckling as she pokes fun at her sense of style and incomplete memory (“Am I remembering the newsreel or that movie with Paul Newman?” she ponders, squinting her left eye, furrowing her brow and raising her index finger into the air). A surprisingly moving show, Rose, written by Martin Sherman and directed by Donald Horn, blends humor and dark narrative with a deftness that makes this two hour monologue fly by. NATALIE BAKER. The CoH
 o Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh St., tripro.org. 7:30 pm Thursdays, 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes April 25. $15-$28.

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