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| Hair
apparent: Lorraine Serabian as Maria Callas. |
Do
As I Say
By James Yeara
Master
Class
By Terrence McNally, directed
by Rob Urbinati
New York State Theatre Institute, through
April 6
Terrence McNally’s 1996 Tony Award-winning play Master
Class will please those who like their theater with strong
conflicts, potent themes, and clean lines: Words dominate.
Ideas stand out. Concepts step up. The protagonist’s stories
grab attention like a rabid pit bull. “Fascinating” and “frightening”
just begin to nip at the surface of McNally’s Maria Callas.
“La Divina,” Callas was the diva’s diva, a crippled psyche
who enunciated the power of theater even as she showed its
costs.
The original production starred the awesome Zoë Caldwell,
and Master Class is a magnet for actresses of sufficient
ego to attempt to fill McNally’s Maria Callas with all the
diva-driven excess an opera star demands. With direct addresses
to the audience, fierce internal monologues directed at Callas’
brutal lover Aristotle Onassis, and even fiercer dialogues
with her essentially clueless students, Master Class
traces an afternoon in the teaching of the legendary Maria
Callas, a fictional account of actual classes Callas taught
at the Juilliard School. Master Class mesmerizes with
its words and ideas of what theater does—even if the center
of this particular production does not hold.
This Master Class—which began months ago at the Helen
Hayes Theater in Nyack—has a smart look that some very tired
performances undermined at Saturday’s opening at the New York
State Theatre Institute. The play centers on Callas’ (Lorraine
Serabian) interactions with her pianist-accompanist Manny
(Ben Morss, who plays the piano well), first-soprano student
Sophie DePalma (Michelle Dawson), nervous second-soprano student
Sharon Graham (the fiery Catherine LaValle), and tenor Tony
Cantolino (Alberto Sanchez). That the raven-haired (courtesy
of a wig by Paul Huntley that stands out more than Serabian’s
performance) Callas calls her students “victims” conveys all
that is needed to know about the master teacher’s approach
to her classes. While her “This isn’t about me. Poof. I’m
invisible” gets a laugh every time, Callas’ classes were
all about her, because she was Art.
Callas batters, belittles and beleaguers her students in the
quest to foster some notion of what theater does. When the
first soprano is so ill-prepared as not to have a pencil,
Callas launches into an anecdote of her life in Greece that
is at the foundation of her artistry: “At the conservatory,
Madame de Hidalgo never once had to ask me if I had a pencil.
And this was during the war, when a pencil wasn’t something
you just picked up at the five-and-ten. Oh no, no, no, no.
A pencil meant something. It was a choice over something else.
You either had a pencil or an orange. I always had a pencil.
I never had an orange. And I love oranges. I knew one day
I would have all the oranges I could want, but that didn’t
make the wanting them any less.”
Time and again Callas tries to connect this or a similar context
to the words to create meaning, but her students just want
to sing. “Find the truth of her situation,” she tells the
first student. “You’re singing in Sanskrit. Words mean something.”
Callas pushes her: “Think about what the words mean, Sophie”
and “Make us feel what you feel. Show us that truth.”
Unfortunately, McNally has set a truthful trap for the unwary,
and as Serabian spoke these words, I thought it was too bad
that she didn’t take them to heart. For this Master Class,
it is useful to point out how sound the play’s words and the
theme are, even if the means are not there to embody them.
While the set creates the look of a classical studio complete
with black baby-grand piano, and while Robert Anton’s black
jacket on black blouse on black pants on black platform heels
with either a long blood-red scarf or a dazzling gold pendant
are nice accessories to Paul Huntley’s luxurious black wig,
Callas should be more than the sum of a look.
Master
Class is such a master work that it will engross and dominate
even if this is one time when the lead performer’s name definitely
should be under the title of the play. Serabian here chooses
oranges, and has no pencil.
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