I’m in the throes of the last week of rehearsals leading up to an event at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills September 4th through the 7th. I play Rose Kennedy, and so does everyone else in the show.

Kathrine Bates, a Theatre 40 stalwart, has written a three-woman performance mosaic titled The Color of Rose. In Bates’s imaginative world, it is the late 1980s and George Bush I is in the White House. It’s Mother’s Day and political grand-matriarch Rose Kennedy, healthy and on her feet, prepares for a television interview before a live audience. As she begins to consider the questions she may be asked and strategizes for shaping truth and omission, two other versions of herself emerge. Energetic, young Rose Fitzgerald, luminous and naive, materializes along with middle-aged Rose Kennedy, edgy and emotional, who grapples with the gentle wisdom that her elder counterpart now carries as effortlessly as she wears a graceful string of pearls.

The process has been fascinating. The reservoir for research of the subject is vast, including a 12-part A&E interview from 1974 available on YouTube. Rose Kennedy navigates the turbulent waters of history, not to be confused with her “past,” with seeming ease belied only by the fact that she almost never actually looks at the interviewer. She laughs about smacking her children and grandchildren with rulers and coat hangers, avoids all mention of the famous philandering of her progeny and their father, or her daughter Rosemary’s tragic lobotomy, and tenderly maneuvers the subject of Chappaquiddick until one is left contemplating only her refinement and dignity. One moment stands out with intense poignancy –- asked whether or not it was worth it that her son was assassinated, since he had, after all, been president of the United States, Rose first declines to answer and then quickly corrects herself and says, “Of course we’d rather have them alive,” referring to both Jack and Bobby. For the only time in the long interview, we see a darkness pass through the famous Fitzgerald eyes and her exquisite, 84-year-old expression reveals the depth of her personal grief.

In The Color of Rose, Gloria Stroock portrays the elder Rose. Having played the role in the 1977 TV movie Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy, Gloria brings to the project a wealth of knowledge and experience of both the subject matter and much of the history itself. Her sister, Geraldine Brooks, is actually pictured in the famous photographs of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, where she stood with her husband, Budd Schulberg, behind the democratic primary victor when he was shot. A generous, hard-working actor, Gloria is a rare artist indeed — enormously talented, aware of her gifts, confident in her technique, and an uncompromising team player. I adore her.

As Young Rose, TV and film veteran, Meredith Bishop is so lovely that, were it not for her deeply sensitive stagecraft, one might get lost in her exquisite visage alone. But Meredith is another ensemble-phile, kindly nourishing her colleagues’ performances rather than stealing the limelight for herself, which she easily could.

Gloria and Meredith make my performance better. When I work with them on stage, I experience Rose –- naïve and wise, heartbroken, resigned, regal, and magnificently human. Their insights inform my perspective of the historic character whose mid-life struggles it is my charge to reanimate.

Highly respected and acclaimed actor-director Ann Hearn has staged the reading with the heart of a mother, a sister, a woman who has lived and known life and sorrow and emerges each day with courage and optimism that puts my self-indulgent dramatics to shame.

Even the stage manager is a woman, our beloved Crystal Munson, who glides over on and off stage hurly-burly with a swan’s grace and sets our stage with the style of a supermodel.

Working with this constellation of women rules.

I am blessed.

As Rose says in the play, “Life is good.”

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