Washington Post reviewer Dolores Gregory praises this Washington Stage Guild production: "It is purposefully untheatrical; there is no need to dramatize something that's this dramatic on its face."

Where: Arena Stage at 14th and T 14th and T, NW Washington, DC When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 24-May 22 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 25-May 24 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, April 26-May 25 Price: $25-$28 Phone: 240-582-0050

Washington Stage Guild closes its 17th season with "Rose," a one-woman play about an elderly Holocaust survivor sitting shiva for the last time. But for whom does she mourn? The answer is not immediate; to get to it, you first must journey with Rose through cataclysmic events of the 20th century.

From the Russian shtetl to the Warsaw ghetto, to the doomed refugee ship Exodus 1947, to the fading glitz of postwar Atlantic City and a second marriage of convenience, Rose has been tossed about like debris. But she is the ultimate survivor, looking back with a sense of detached wonder and an admirable lack of bitterness. Did it really happen the way she remembers? Or are those images in her mind merely flickers from some old movie?

As directed by Bill Largess and performed by Barbara Rappaport, "Rose" is an exercise in pure storytelling: just an old woman sitting on a bench, recalling the people she held most dear. It is purposefully untheatrical; there is no need to dramatize something that's this dramatic on its face. To do so would demean the material. And as written by Martin Sherman, Rose herself is a bit of a charmer, with a natural talent for spinning out a story.

The Jewish rite of mourning requires that Rose remain still, on her wooden bench, as she reminisces about the dead. But Rose recalls not the immediately deceased, whom she does not know at all, but her own lost family -- her mother, brother, sister-in-law, daughter and, especially, her first husband, a Gypsy artist whom the Nazis marched away into the woods one day and almost certainly murdered.

In "Rose," Sherman revisits familiar territory; he is the author of "Bent," a groundbreaking play about the Nazi extermination of gays.

But whether the character is a man wearing a pink triangle or a young woman hiding in the sewers of Warsaw, the subject of the Holocaust has been by now so well documented that no matter what the story, we can well guess the direction it will go. Here we guess wrong. To our surprise, "Rose" brings something new to the topic, a sense of perspective that one can gain only after 80 years of consideration.

It's a long unbroken line from Auschwitz to the Left Bank, a line that few of the current political pundits have cared to draw, but Sherman draws it, not in the grand sweep of history but through the minutiae of one woman's small life.

Personal history is the lens through which politics comes clear, and Sherman has focused that lens on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a most unexpected way.

Rose, by Martin Sherman. Directed by Bill Largess. Performed by Barbara Rappaport. Set by Tracie Duncan, sound by Daniel Schrader, lights by Marianne Meadows, costume by William Pucilowsky.

Through May 25, 2003 at the Washington Stage Guild, performing at Arena Stage at 14th and T, 1901 14th St. NW.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes with no intermission.
Call 240-582-0050.