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# This ‘Rose’ has thorns
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/this-rose-has-thorns/
- Published: 2008-07-12T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T00:21:18.000Z
- Author: Cynthia Citron
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

“ROSE,” WHICH OPENED THIS WEEK AT the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, is a great acting coup for its star, Naomi Newman. For its author, Martin Sherman, not so much.

Newman is an accomplished storyteller, which is fortunate, since she remains seated on a wooden bench for the entire two hours it takes to tell Rose’s tale, her only movement being to take occasional sips of water. She is sitting shivah, mourning the deaths in her family. And at 80, she has outlived nearly all of them. “We Jews,” she says, “don’t have heaven, we don’t have hell, and we don’t come back!”

Rose’s story begins in a shtetl, a small village, in the Ukraine, and eventually encompasses the entire sweep of Jewish history in the 20th century. Pogroms — Cossak attacks on Jewish villagers — drive her to Poland, where she meets her first husband, the love of her life, and enjoys a few years of happiness. Then the Nazis come to power and she is herded into the Warsaw Ghetto where people live 12 to a room. “We were no longer cattle; we were sardines,” she says. Her mother and father, sister and brother, husband and daughter, are killed. She sits shivah for them for two years in the sewers of Warsaw.

When the war ends, she is saved by an American sailor, whom she marries, and they board a dilapidated old ship for the trip to Palestine. It’s 1947, and the ship is the Exodus, and, as history records, they are turned away from the Promised Land. “God is like a policeman,” she observes. “He’s never around when you need him.”

Throughout her adventurous life she remains an “outsider,” taking great joy in “not belonging.” As a girl, she says, “I became pretentious in several languages,” and she notes that “the greatest Jewish contribution” to the world is “asking questions that have no answers.”

Eventually, she comes to America with her husband, to his home in Atlantic City (she calls it “Warsaw on the sea”), and has another child: a son. She tries to “surround (her husband) with the illusion of love,” and when he dies, she mourns, “not for his death, but for his life.”

She gets a job in a hotel. She becomes a hippie, living in a Connecticut commune with a lover 20 years her junior. She marries the owner of the hotel. And so on. And on.

“Rose” will continue at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 South Sepulveda Blvd., in Los Angeles, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through August 31\. Call (310) 477-2055 for reservations.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 12, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/071208.pdf?ref=smdp.com)