Responses to Rose

From Colleagues:

Naomi:
Your performance tonight was stunning. Congratulations. Mazel Tov. The play is fantastic and your work in it truly brilliant. You are an inspiration. Thanks for the great work, your perseverance, your style and strength and depth and humor.
Much love,
Nina (Nina Wise, improviser, writer, teacher and performance artist)

Naomi:
Hope you are able to catch your breath and get some rest after all the excitement last night. What a lovely evening and what a glorious performance! The whole theatre was spellbound...everyone was with you and I heard at least three people say that they felt like they were the only one in the room with you...it felt that intimate. You have created such a wonderful character...thank goodness you found her or she found you...whichever. I hope the rest of the run is as exhilarating. I know it is a lot of work and ton of energy...really, I don't know how you do it. But I can't wait to come and see it again. As it can only grower richer and deeper. All my love to you and a blessing on your long run,
Jeri Lynn (TJT Associate Artist)

From the Community:

Hi Devra:
My friends and I loved Rose on Saturday night. I don't know how Naomi Newman does it, but she was riveting and inhabits her character. This should have a great run...
Rose Katz
Program Coordinator
BJE Jewish Community Library

Dear Devra:
Naomi was amazing. I will spread the word about "Rose" and please pass along my warmest compliments on Ms. Newman's amazing work!
David Rachleff, MSW

Hi Devra
My husband and I saw Rose last weekend up in San Francisco and we loved it!
I am teaching an upper-division class -- writing about the Holocaust -- and I am hoping I can organize a trip to see the show. We would need 12-15 tickets. Is that possible? Let me know.
Thanks so much!!
Jill

From the Critics

J the Jewish news weekly:

It may be old hat to Newman to hold a rapt audience in the palm of her hand, but it never gets old for theatergoers, including the appreciative ones that packed the house on opening night Sunday, Jan. 7…

Sherman saves several juicy surprises for the final minutes, tying together various threads and lending to the play –– and Rose –– a fitting coda to a life well lived. credit Sherman with giving Rose a great sense of humor. Recalling her idyllic shtetl girlhood, at one point she wonders aloud if she’s really remembering it, or just thinking of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Rose is a cut-up, but a mortally wounded one. She sits shiva for good reasons… Joan Mankin’s direction is appropriately understated, with subtle touches of light and sound evoking far away memories. She wisely leaves the heavy lifting to Newman, who pulls it off with aplomb… Newman may have remained seated for two hours, but it was the audience that stood, cheering, at the end.

SF Chronicle:

Newman invests [Rose] with grace notes of sly humor, wry self-consciousness and touching warmth.

Please post your response using the "comment" option below.

TJT's ROSE blossoms

Rose opened last night to one of the longest standing ovations I’ve ever seen in our theatre. I’ve been working with Naomi since 1968. Forty years this summer. I’m happy to say this is the best work I’ve ever seen her do. I wasn’t personally involved with this production and didn’t see any rehearsals until the last one before previews began. I loved what I saw but on Sunday night, I witnessed the play, the character and the performance fusing into an incandescent whole.

As Aaron Davidman said afterwards, it was a triumph of storytelling. Theatre as storytelling. Storytelling as theatre. Naomi, alone on stage for over two hours (which go by with a fluidity we rarely get to experience in the jangle of our days), illuminates Rose’s personal history as it intersects the wounded landscape of modern Jewish, European, Middle-Eastern and American history.

Together with our associate artist, Joan Mankin, who directed the production, Naomi has shaped a performance in which artifice disappears, effort vanishes and craft is subsumed into an act of witnessing as generous as it is courageous.

I was reminded of Antonin Artaud’s call for a theatre in which the stakes were so high, it would be as if the actor were “signaling through the flames.”

Sherman, the playwright, subverts almost all our expectations of what an 80 year-old Jewish woman might have to say about the life in a Ukrainian shtetl, the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel and Palestine, love and sex and grief, tumbleweeds and motion pictures.

Neuroscientists have been saying a lot about “mirror neurons” lately. When you see someone drink a glass of water and find yourself salivating, that’s your neurons firing in a pattern that mirrors the activity of the drinker’s neurons. Same thing when we see someone smile or frown or weep or laugh. Experiencing Rose, my neurons got quite a work out, as they mirrored Rose’s/Naomi’s sudden, unexpected shifts between exhilaration and irony, joy and fear, shock and regret, heartbreak and helpless laughter.

-Corey Fischer, founding member

For tickets, go to our website.