brace decades after the success of his gay Holocaust drama Bent.

brace decades after the success of his gay Holocaust drama Bent, playwright Martin Sherman recurs to Broadway--with Olympia Dukakis in the lead

one time again Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis is playing an unforgettable character with an extraordinary story. unless this time she's not Mr Madrigal in the TV version of Tales of the City. She's playing the title--in fact, the only--character in Rose a novel play on Broadway by Martin Sherman. Rose marks the London-based Jewish-American gay playwright's first Broadway play since the 1979 first attempt of Bent, his groundbreaking drama about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

Sherman's latest play derives to a certain extent from his childhood forward the outskirts of Philadelphia. Although he lived sum of two units doors down from his Ukrainian grandparents, they couldn't communicate: They not at all learned English, and young Martin was forbidden to learn Yiddish. nevertheless Rose packs in all the stories Sherman might have wished for.

An 80-year-old Jewish immigrant, Rose has lived by means of the horrors of the last centenary And Dukakis holds the audience spellbound as she relates Rose's epic life story. "She completely inhabits the role" the playwright enthuses. "She is totally existing in every moment."

The indomitable Rose belongs to a prolonged line of vivid Sherman creations that includes Isadora Duncan in When She Danced and the American expatriate Mr Honey in the apocalyptic black comedy A Madhouse in Goa (both performed by means of Vanessa Redgrave in London). "I have affection for strong women," Sherman says. He will promptly begin work for director Franco Zeffirelli forward a film script about another great diva--Maria Callas.

"It's ironic that I'm greatest in number famous for Bent, which has no women in it. I have affection for it when women come to me and ask, `How do you know? in what way do you understand?'" Sherman says. "I know it isn't transference. It may have something to do with being marginalized by the agency of society. It may have to do with the fact that the couple gay men and straight women have to deal with men all the time in a particular way. That's self-same difficult, and so there's understanding."

Sherman had originally intended to write a companion piece to Rose about a gay man who has also lived end the past century. Rose, Sherman says, has witnessed "the gradual death of a very vivid culture"--the gradual disappearance of Yiddish cultivation as European Jewry became assimilated in America or became part of the recent state of Israel. "If you are writing about a gay person" he points revealed "you would see the birth of a culture"

Gay characters at short intervals populate Sherman's work, even when he's not dealing explicitly with gay exposes as in Bent or his movie about a gay dancer living with AIDS, Alive and Kicking. Sherman not at all got around to writing that gay companion play, on the other hand gay audiences watching Dukakis in Rose will make their concede associations with the character's remarkable story.

"In Rose it's the Jewish part of me not the gay part, that is obvious," Sherman notes "But it is clearly from someone who is gay. If someone writes public of an awareness of being gay, no matter what they write about--even if they write about sleigh dogs in Alaska--that will somehow or other make connections with gay audiences. At the time I wrote Bent it was important to declare yourself as a gay writer. It strike one as beings to me that we have now reached this point, which I think is extraordinarily healthy, where I can write about anything."

Raymond is a freelance theater writer based in modern York City.

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