‘Rosa' is a tale of love and life choices in a time gone by. The catch is, it's told by Rosa's real life granddaughter Roz Pappalardo through songs and words.
Roz was inspired after moving back home in North Queensland almost three years ago. “Coming back to the familiar territory of my youth, being in the environment, the hot and wet environment and being around my family inspired me to want to tell a family story. I had seen another woman do a one-woman play which was very powerful and inspiring and made me think 'I kind of want to tell my story like that'. They were two major things,” Roz says. “Searching back through my memories and picking up these threads of stories about Rosa. All these stories are going to die when that generation of family die as well. I wrote the thing in about six to eight months, so it came pretty quickly.”
Rosa passed away at the young age of 42 and Roz never had a chance to meet her grandmother. She discovered all she could mainly by talking to family members, but she also found information after a natural disaster. “My father and his brother are different ages with my uncle being quite a lot younger than him, so it was really interesting getting their [memories] of her, because she did die quite young.
I also talked to my mother who told me stories that Dad had told her as well. I looked through a lot of old pictures that my family had stored and did a lot of piecing together of stories and asking 'who was that, when was that'. I did a lot of talking. I did a lot of looking at things she owned. After cyclone Larry in 2006, we found an old sea chest that my family had been storing in their house, and after the cyclone destroyed the house we discovered this chest with a whole bunch of objects in it, which was a perfect launching pad to writing this play.”
'Rosa' runs on Saturday June 7 at the Ipswich Civic Theatre and June 14 at Brisbane Powerhouse.
