Digital Extra

2/20/97
Rose Weaver: 'Applause does not feed you'

By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

"Careful the wish you make, children will listen," Rose Weaver sings at center stage.

"Careful the things you say, children will hear."

Her mezzo-soprano floats up into the tangle of branches that caps the set overhead and the lyric sounds like a portend.

On this Wednesday, Trinity Repertory Company is about to open Stephen Sonheim's musical Into the Woods. The actors, clad in jeans and sweatshirts, slouch in three rows of the upstairs theater, while director Oscar Eustis runs through his production notes. Many of them are directed to Weaver. A long-time company member, she plays a principal role as the witch in this production about the dark side of childhood stories.

But an actor's lot is no fairy tale, despite a persistent myth that life under the Klieg lights insulates you from loneliness or misfortune. Rose Weaver knows better.

"We women still can't make the money men can. I don't know of one week that has gone by that I haven't encountered sexism and racism," she declares during a break in rehearsals.

"None of it takes away my love of life," she concludes just as certainly.

That's surely because, Weaver, at 48 years old, has enjoyed almost a quarter of a century of modest success as an actor and singer. And the roles she has played -- from a judge on the television series L.A. Law to her current run in Into the Woods -- know neither gender nor racial bounds.

Her days and nights are crammed with rehearsals, performances, club dates and her duties as an Artist in Residence for Providence public schools. From this perspective, she can see all the inroads African-American women have made in the performing arts and all the roadblocks still ahead.

She compares the life of Rhode Island opera singer Sissieretta Jones to her own and sees the paradoxes. Jones was a talented soprano in the late 1800s who was barred by racial prejudice from pursuing an operatic career. Her husband tried to make her look more Caucasian by lightening her skin and straightening her hair, but Jones was forced to make her living doing minstrel shows.

"It has not gone away -- black women are still frying their hair. And some of those (sitcoms featuring African-American actors) -- they might as well be coon shows -- I don't watch them," Weaver says with contempt.

"We've had a better shake than our mothers," she nevertheless acknowledges. "There is progress, but it's not where it should be by now."

Yet Weaver herself has come a long way. She has often talked about her past: her childhood as the eldest of Georgia sharecroppers' six children, her tumultuous school days as one of the few black students bused to an all-white school, her early motherhood to two sons.

But the racial barriers that marked her youth got lower as she got older. The high school drama club and the chorus accepted her on the strength of her singing talent. Weaver entered Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., through the Upward Bound program and went on to become president of the sophomore class and the drama club. At age 24, she became an acting fellow with Trinity Repertory.

In 1984, Weaver moved to Los Angeles with new husband, Francis LaMountain, and launched her career on the West Coast. She won roles on popular television shows L.A. Law and The Heat of the Night and in films like Poetic Justice and The Accused. She snagged lots of concert gigs and stage work, but stardom was elusive.

In 1988 Trinity called her back for a role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and in 1993, for The Good Times Are Killing Me. She returned to Rhode Island in 1994 to play Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, and stayed.

Her blood, she likes to say, is in these walls. Trinity has been a second home, partial to multicultural casting.

The world outside isn't so hospitable.

"African-American women are at the bottom of the totem pole," Weaver said. "And that's where it takes a strong constitution."

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