McNally's "Golden Age' by PTC (2nd review)

Golden Age is billed as the third in a trilogy of plays about opera by Terrence McNally. This new piece is much different in tone from McNally's 1989 comedy, The Lisbon Traviata, but bears similarity to his 1995 drama, Master Class, which also received its world premiere by the Philadelphia Theatre Company.

It's instructive to note that McNally actually wrote a fourth play about opera, Prelude and Liebestod. What the three in this so-called trilogy really have in common is not just opera, but the soprano Maria Callas, the obsession of McNally's life.

The Lisbon Traviata concerns a fan's search for a tape of an especially significant Callas performance, while Master Class concerns the woman herself. Golden Age, on the other hand, takes place 89 years before Callas was born, so you may wonder how McNally could arrange to involve her in it.

Here's how. Golden Age gives a prominent part to the mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, who was a precursor of the Callas persona. Both were known for stormy personality and dramatic intensity as well as their libertarian approach to sex and marriage. But McNally has invested the first Maria with even more Callas characteristics than she actually possessed.

His Malibran talks, as Callas later did, about how she has lost her voice and has come to Paris to die, which Callas did at age 53. But Malibran was only 28 when she died— not in Paris but in London, after a horseback riding accident. It isn't that McNally is cheating, or trying to put something over on us. I believe that the playwright is expressing his passion for Callas, and he's doing it with a wink to those of us who share his enthusiasm for Callas's singing and acting.

(The music we hear offstage, by the way, is a recording made by Callas.)

Seizing center stage

Golden Age chronicles the premiere of Bellini's opera, I Puritani (The Puritans.) Malibran wasn't even in the cast of Puritani. (In fact, she never appeared in any Bellini premiere.) Instead she sneaks in to see the opening night of the opera and gradually proceeds to take center stage. She speaks of how the text always comes ahead of the music, and how she probes for the truth inside whatever she performs. She even recites the text of Puritani's big aria, much as Callas did in McNally's Master Class.

McNally's concentration on Malibran diverts us from the composer, Bellini, who otherwise should be the center of our attention. He was prodigiously gifted, died young, and we know little about his personal life. So here was a golden opportunity for McNally to explore.

What McNally does show of Bellini is insecure and shallow, and Austin Pendleton compounds the problem by directing Jeffrey Carlson as a fey poseur. "People love me for what I write," McNally's Bellini laments, "not for who I am." But what we see of him isn't lovable. We soon lose interest in his mincing, and our attention (like McNally's) turns to the carryings-on of the four star singers in Puritani's premiere.

Follow your instincts, Terrence

I advise McNally to go with his instincts and focus on his obvious passion. Go, Terrence, and explore the enduring appeal of Callas's art. Show us how she makes you "see the music inside the music." Explain how you "hear the passion of life" when she sings. Explain why Bellini never put the first Maria in his operas but, apparently, locked his passion for her in a closet.

Golden Age is divided into three acts as it mirrors the performance of the opera. That's logical, but each act needs to fly faster.

The best work onstage is provided by Marc Kudisch as an egocentric baritone and Christopher Michael McFarland as a surprisingly aware and confident tenor. The range of topics they manage to discuss is prodigious. Music lovers will relish hearing about vocal techniques, public tastes, jealousies and gossip about other singers and composers, but this goes on too long.

A cucumber in his trousers

McNally elicits cheap laughs by having the baritone stuff a cucumber in his trousers to appear sexually endowed, as he says he's adding "characterization." This schtick, needlessly repeated, lowers the tone of the play, as does a fuss that the singers make about ordering and eating a pizza. The romantic obsessions of the male singers are another unnecessary distraction, and two proposal scenes could be excised.

Another one of my favorite playwrights, Donald Margulies, just said about his latest piece: "The difference between L.A. and New York is really pruning it— it was overwritten, I was trying things out, which is what a world premiere is for." That's what McNally and director Pendleton must do.

I hope some interesting little things won't be cut, like the delicious inside joke of Bellini playing "People Will Say We're in Love," from Oklahoma!, as an aria-in-progress from his next opera and a listener commenting that Bellini has never written anything like that.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read responses, click here.