Once upon a time, a young couple fleeing poverty and starvation emigrated to the United States seeking their fortune in the great city of Boston. Like most recently arrived ethnic minorities, they were shunned by their neighbors initially. Over decades of determined assimilation, the descendants of these proud settlers rose to positions of power, until a third-generation son, impatient with his progenitors' slow progress, vowed to sire a succession of leaders to the entire nation. His ambitions were fulfilled — but not without terrible sacrifice. Nowadays the Kennedy name is most often associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and that of senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, but also with a 1969 scandal involving Edward, who, while escorting a lady home from a party, drove his car off a bridge into the river below, drowning his passenger, but leaving him unharmed, albeit too befuddled to take proper emergency measures. The Kennedy daughters, too, received their share of publicity — through their marital activities, later through their defiance of parental authority, and finally for their own accomplishments as philanthropists and crusaders in their own right. Laurence Leamer's Rose introduces us to 79-year-old Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy at her summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, keeping her appointment with the co-writer of her memoirs despite her distress at the latest shadow cast by her last surviving male offspring upon a clan already associated with misfortune in popular myth. Small wonder that — in the intervals between telephone calls from likewise distraught relatives — his mother finds herself reflecting on her own role in precipitating her children's unhappy lives and untimely deaths, her capitulation to their father's ruthless machinations influenced by a faith exhorting her to unquestioning obedience, self-imposed humility and rejection of "unnecessary thoughts," even as these same tenets now comfort her in sorrow. Leamer's previous training as a writer of prose rather than plays is evident in his hackneyed implementation of photo albums as a device for delivering exposition, and his subject's occasional lapses into oratory — speaking, for example, of a funeral attended by "the poor, the weak, the downtrodden" (how often do you hear the word "downtrodden" in everyday conversation?). In the hands of director Steve Scott and actor Linda Reiter, however, the regrets and remorse suffered by this matriarch in her twilight years are vividly manifested in her chronicle, commanding — if not our undiluted approval — our sympathies and, ultimately, our absolution.
