Weaver's tale

Rose blooms anew with Silhouette

by Bill Rodriguez

The talented Rose Weaver makes it all look easy. Jazz singer, actor, community activist, and playwright. All accomplished with buoyant style, so urgent and whole-hearted that -- unless you notice the sweat -- it would pass for easy.

And now, a fresh playwriting MFA tucked under her arm, she will see her one-act Silhouette of a Silhouette staged on February 4 and 5 as part of Brown University's annual New Plays Festival (and at Carriage House Theater on February 11 and 12).

"In a nutshell, it's a play about redemption. It is taken from an autobiographical incident. I've been struggling with the fact that my brothers died tragic deaths at an early age anyway, so I've tried to change it into creativity," Weaver explains, sitting over a bowl of clam chowder at Player's Corner Pub, across from Trinity Repertory Company, her theatrical alma mater. As she neglects her cooling lunch, she is the picture of vivacity and style, a swath of black lace serving as a scarf beneath an elegant brown velvet hat.

It was playwright and Brown professor Aishah Rahman who got Weaver interested in applying to the writing program. Before she entered ("as a gift to myself") two years ago, she had written mostly scenes and monologues, typically to perform as self-esteem pieces for youth audiences. In 1994, two of her monologues went into For Women, By Women, alongside such recognized playwrights as Paula Vogel. A full-fledged play, Backyard Blues, received a full production at a Los Angeles playwriting festival. At Brown, she dusted off that playscript for revision.

The writing program gave Weaver permission to trust her Southern voice -- she grew up in Atlanta -- and was instructed to forget about structure while gestating a play, to just write down scenes rather than try to structure the eventual sequence at first.

"That freed me up," she says. "I'd be sitting in the bathtub sometimes, and I'd visualize a scene and I would feel it and I would get out and go write."

And while her first draft of Silhouette was "disjointed" -- her word -- she is much more satisfied with the current version, number 7 or 8. Gradually, Weaver recalls, the dramatic arc of each character became clearer to workshop members as she reshaped the play.

"I think my acting experience has added greatly to my ability to write a monologue or dialogue. Because I live it. I live each character," Weaver observes. "That's a wonderful thing. I've walked in so many shoes anyway in the theater as an actress, that it's not hard for me to imagine what a character wants and does and is."

That makes her think of another advantage she has.

"You know what one of the most important things for playwriting is? Experience. Life experience," Weaver says. "It's harder to write plays if you don't have a full well, if you don't have things in there."

"I have a yard-full of stuff!" she laughingly adds.

But Weaver wasn't laughing much as she gathered some of that personal history. Take where she got interested in theater, an Atlanta high school she was bussed to in the 1960s. "Nobody liked me. I wasn't allowed to do anything," she recalls. "Everywhere I looked, somebody was calling me the N-word, or spitting or something."

A red-headed female chorus teacher who also taught drama suggested that she sign up for upcoming chorus auditions. Another teacher-advisor took her to a play and "saved my life, really."

Ever since, singing and acting have been her lifelines, as well as her livelihood. Weaver was a drama major at Wheaton College, where she thrived. She came to Trinity in 1973 as an "acting fellow" before there was a conservatory, and got her Actors Equity card two years later. Soon after that her husband of three months committed suicide. She then went to New York and signed on for a year-long road show with National Theatre Company.

"We did a 189-city tour. I don't remember any of it. I suppose that's a therapy session some day," Weaver says. "To go through something like that, that's traumatic. And I wasn't really old enough to know what I was supposed to do."

She certainly has packed in the coping skills and experience since then. There has been the occasional TV and movie work; playing opposite Carroll O'Connor in In the Heat of the Night was one high point, as was being the fallback choice for it when Alfre Woodard wasn't available. Weaver says she gained a lot of respect for the grueling work of soap opera actors when she appeared in a half-season of The Young and the Restless in the early '90s. She made a good living doing commercials and industrial films in Boston, which she needed to put her son Michael through Moses Brown. When she left the Trinity company in 1984, it was to follow her Harvard MBA husband ("a great guy") to his job there. Since divorced, she says they remain good friends.

Weaver has appeared periodically at Trinity since that time. Most notable was her one-person turn in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill in 1994, playing jazz icon Billie Holiday.

"That was probably my most challenging role, which used all of my talents, all of my emotion, all of my control, all of my ability to be honest and really create," she says.

Weaver was the first and only choice for that role, of course, since she has earned a large local following as a singer in the African-American chanteuse tradition. She has sung with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and three times with the Rhode Island Philharmonic.

"It hasn't been easy. But I do love it so much that I've taken ridicule from my family at times when they say, `Why don't you sing like Whitney Houston? You'd make a lot of money ' " -- and she coughs out a soft laugh -- " `Why did you pick jazz? There's no money in it.' "

Singing, acting, doing commercials, producing and hosting some 300 public affairs talk shows for WJAR-TV in the '80s. Have her various talents been in conflict? I ask.

"No. I'm a black actress. I mean the down, nitty-gritty shit-hit-the-fan time is: I'm a black actress in this country," she responds. "I don't admit it and I don't buy into it most of the time, but the actual fact is that I have not been able to find enough to keep me busy in one of those areas. Therefore I really am lucky that I am multi-talented.

"Those folks that I know who are not, they sit around and twiddle their thumbs and they ache. And it's a deep ache. I can't tell you," Weaver says. "A deep ache to be at the bottom of the totem pole according to the newspapers and the magazines and the statistics. It's a deep ache."

A full half-minute passes before she continues.

"I'm very lucky that I have the stamina," she says, brightening a bit with the observation as she dabs her eyes with a napkin. "I've lived a decent life. I don't have a big house on the East Side. But I've lived the life of an artist."

Soon Rose Weaver declares, with a wry smile: "Have I paid my dues."

I point out that she's due a refund.

She laughs, of course.