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    Theatre Review: CATCO’s Master Class Mashes Up History and Myth in a Pulpy Potboiler

    Terrance McNally is one of the finest dramatists of the last 30 years, doing traditional plays with rock-solid dramatic values and reminding us how good that kind of work can be. Master Class has always held a special place in my heart since its touring company came through town while I was in high school.

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    Master Class is on the pulpier end of the McNally spectrum. His Callas is a composite, merging other opera divas like Leontyne Price with the gossipy corners of Callas’ biography, as well as a mouthpiece to expound on the risks and sacrifices that must be made to commit to an art form, the uncertainty of building a career based on the fickle opinions of the public, and the inherent dangers of living in the past.

    The play is set over two hours of Callas (Ilona Dulaski) teaching a master class at Julliard in the early 1970s, including three students coming on stage to sing and receive her feedback (a word she makes it hilariously clear that she hates). The only times the show leaves that teaching, that stage, is when the students’ repertoire sends Callas back through her memories. These flashback sequences are evocatively conveyed as the stage is plunged into darkness, leaving a single spotlight on Dulaski, and the sound behind her melts into phantasms of live, sometimes scratchy, recordings of the real Callas singing.

    The play gets off to a rocky start. Dulaski’s entrance seems tentative, and the tart introductory line, “No applause?” leads to long minutes of the audience not being sure if they should participate or not, and the kind of discomfort you get when the teacher seems more interested in being liked than communicating a love for the work. Obviously, this is part of the text, and of Callas’ character, but it feels sluggish and belabored here, despite some charming interplay with the accompanist, Manny Weinstock (Quinton Jones).

    The three students are less fleshed-out characters and more foils for specific pieces of Callas’s background and intent. They shade the arc that brought Maria Callas to this moment and, through that chiaroscuro, highlight the things that made her a legend – both the universal qualities of great artists, and what she specifically values that maybe not everyone does.

    Quinton Jones (accompanist) left, Ilona Dulaski (Maria Callas) center, and Sara Pardo (Sharon Graham) star in the CATCO’s upcoming production  and central Ohio premier of Master Class Feb. 11-March 1. Photo by Ben Sostrom.
    Quinton Jones (accompanist) left, Ilona Dulaski (Maria Callas) center, and Sara Pardo (Sharon Graham) star in the CATCO’s upcoming production
    and central Ohio premier of Master Class Feb. 11-March 1. Photo by Ben Sostrom.

    The first soprano, Sophie DePalma, is played beautifully by Alexandra Kassouf, as very young, lovely, and tentative. Her choice of aria, from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, is canny, but she barely gets out one note before Callas sees through the thinness of her interpretation. This lets Callas expand on the importance of understanding earlier interpretations – to make something your own, you have to know what you’re taking from your forebears and what you’re choosing to discard. Possibly the most telling moment in the entire play occurs in this sequence: the student didn’t bring a pencil to write notes on her score. Callas remembers always having a pencil, even when, during the war, that meant going without food, and it’s made clear DePalma would have never considered that choice. Kassouf has just enough melancholy in her voice and demeanor as the character says, “I’m not that kind of singer. I’m not that kind of person, either.” You see, in that moment, the realization radiate across her face that she might never draw on as deep a wellspring of interpretation and that, on some level, she knew it all along.

    The tenor, Tony Candolino, is played by Daniel López as a well-tuned machine of gliding, grinning, charm, so obvious a Mario Lanza type that Lanza is even name-checked during his lesson. The impression is he’ll never be greater than very good but he’s not trying to be, either, and Callas knows there’s only so much she can teach when those are his ambitions. He’s the future, pop opera for stadiums. It’s also brought up how good looking he is, harkening back to Callas’ earlier comment that “you have to develop a look” and echoing the flashback where stagehands and observers cruelly commented on her looks.

    The third student and second soprano, Sharon Graham (Sara Pardo), has the most to work with. She leaves at first – she can’t take the criticism – but she comes back, saying she’s been throwing up. That determination to try again sparks something in Callas, and the diva rides the student in a fascinating, irritating way, determined to see how close Graham can – or will – get. Her aria is from Verdi’s Macbeth, and Callas’s advice draws on a deep understanding of this opera and also of Medea – two roles, it could be argued, of which Callas’s interpretation has never been bettered.

    Callas fights for the acting here, that the player has to go back to the source and synthesize that feeling on a bone-deep level, so it comes through the notes. “Listen to Verdi. It’s in the dissonances” – if the singer doesn’t understand why those dissonances are there, the singing can be beautiful but it’s not opera – it doesn’t open up the ribcage the way it’s supposed to. Callas’ key line happens here: “Ho datto tutto a te,” from Medea, “I gave everything for you.” It came up earlier, talking about the sacred duty of the artist to make people forget themselves: “In La Scala, standing center stage, you can even make Leonard Bernstein forget he’s Leonard Bernstein.” Pardo is a revelation, choosing a third path, of dedication to the work and to the characters but not self-immolation, as she fires back at Callas with, “I don’t like you;” the venom never exceeding who she’s shown the character to be, the joy at learning things and the rampant, fiery confidence fuse. In these small gestures, the character becomes a person and then is gone.

    Throughout all of these lessons, after the aforementioned early tentativeness, Ilona Dulaski is a supernova. She sells the dedication and sacrifice that made Callas who she was by this point, you can feel the ash on her heels and the blood on her hands, and just how much of it is the character’s own. There isn’t a second where you don’t buy the character’s belief in who she is, the ways in which the character might be lying to herself, and the subtle manipulations she lays at the feet of her students.

    The portions of the play where Dulaski is less strong and very uneven come in the flashbacks. First, she’s done such a good job implying these feelings that the flashbacks feel repetitive and superfluous. Second, the middle flashback, discussing her relationship with Aristotle Onassis, forces the actor to play both voices and she performs the “younger Maria” voice in a high-pitched child’s voice – Callas and Onassis met when she was 34, already married, and a world-renowned success, not a child – and turns that sequence into a cartoon. That flashback is so jarring that the later flashback, where she plays one side of a wrenching conversation with Onassis, doesn’t hit with the same punch it could. The Medea echoes made clear in that last flashback are the fulcrum the play rotates on but they feel ephemeral.

    My biggest concern was Joe Bishara’s direction, but I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what. Entrances seem abrupt and things take longer to get going. This production was almost 20 minutes longer than others I’ve seen and it feels long. Things feel sluggish and arbitrary, the audience visibly got restless at points. CATCO’s Master Class pulls it together when it has to, but its knives are duller than they should be.

    Master Class runs through March 1, 2015. Showtimes are 11:00am on Wednesdays, 8:00pm Thursdays-Saturdays, with 2:00pm matinées on Sundays. For tickets and more information, visit CATCO.org

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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