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...