'Rose' sits well with Dukakis

As a feat of memorization, Martin Sherman's "Rose" is astounding.

In the one-woman play, the 80-year-old Rose tells her story, an epic journey of one Ukrainian Jewish woman through the 20th century, alone onstage while sitting. And that's hard.

The formidable Lowell native Olympia Dukakis plays Rose for six performances beginning Tuesday at the Calderwood Pavilion, presented by Bank of America Celebrity Series. Dukakis spoke to the Globe by phone from New York, fast forwarding through the events of Rose's life: "Shtetl to Warsaw ghetto to the sewers to the Exodus boat, where she met an American sailor, to Atlantic City to Florida, where she ran a hotel with her third husband, to Israel." Rose covers all this while sitting shiva, in mourning.

Sherman was a fellow student with Dukakis at Boston University, she says, and he "decided I was the one to do it. So I read it. It was like 74 pages! I just didn't think I could do it. It spans decades in the 20th century. How do you hold all that, shape it every night?"

But the opportunity to play Rose outweighed the fears, and she did so, at London's Royal National Theatre in 1999 and on Broadway. "It's political, deeply personal, very comic, very serious, very moving," she says. "It's a tremendous landscape, a big arc."

Dukakis may be best known for her film performances in "Steel Magnolias" and "Moonstruck," for which she won an Oscar, but she's also a veteran of some 130 stage productions, off-Broadway and regionally. But this role, she says, changed her as an actress -- "what I thought I was able to handle and how concentrated I could remain, how convinced I could be of myself for two hours."

In Boston, Dukakis is not doing the two-hour version of the play, but a 95-minute concert version. "I'm here with a book," she says. "I did memorize it, but to keep it up, I'd have to make it part of my life every week, and I don't perform the play that much. I sit there on a bench on a rug in a costume with a wig, and I read it. But obviously there are chunks that I know."

As far as being stationary, Dukakis says, "I've grown to love doing it that way, sitting there, taking in the audience. [Rose] really reaches for the audiences, for their understanding and compassion."

Through Jan 21 at the Boston Center for the Arts. Tickets: $52, $67, 617-933-8600, bostontheatrescene.org, celebrityseries.org. A special performance on Wednesday benefits Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Geriatric Care Program and Celebrity Series' Arts, Education and Community Program. Tickets: $500, $1,000. Information: 617-598-3220.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's megamusical "Cats," celebrating its 25th anniversary, will come to the Opera House Feb. 20-25. Tickets, $17.50-$74.50, go on sale Sunday at 617-931-2787, Ticketmaster.com, Broadwayacrossamerica.com.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.