Dreamscapes

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

MYSTERY OF THE ROSE BOUQUET

by Manuel Puig

In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the novel of two mismatched prison inmates that became an Oscar-winning film, Manuel Puig portrayed how enforced intimacy can impel people to enter each other's psyches. Mystery of the Rose Bouquet, now at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, explores the same phenomenon. This time the setting is a hospital in Argentina, and the characters who drift into each other's dreamscapes are women -- an old contrary patient, rich and autocratic (Anne Bancroft), and a middle-aged nurse whose outward cheer belies a lifetime of thwarted opportunity and scant satisfaction (Jane Alexander).

By the end, they achieve an emotional bond -- a standard for hospital melodrama -- but in reveries rather than everyday contact. The patient becomes a stand-in for the nurse's dead mother; the nurse is transformed into the patient's long-lost sister, then an estranged daughter. The little dramas of hospital routine thus become freighted with the burdens of decades. Trivial exchanges achieve the dimensions of catharsis. Puig deftly interweaves other themes, including the oppression of all women under Latin machismo and the extent to which South Americans may still defensively see theirs as a colonial culture.

Bancroft, playing a South American aristocrat, sounds more like South Brooklyn and about as aristocratic as a hash-house waitress. Alexander ably sketches differences among the dowager's airhead sister, mean daughter and timid nurse, but, as the last, lapses into a singsong that has become her trademark shorthand for innocence. Adding to the problem, Robert Allan Ackerman's archly formal staging emphasizes ritual over a sense of place. Still, the two women establish an ever shifting power dynamic. In the last fantasy, when they embrace fondly in an imagined courtyard, their warmth and urgency enable the audience to share in an emotional payoff.