"This isn't about me," Faye Dunaway says, and the audience giggles madly. Master Class, Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning portrait of opera soprano Maria Callas, started over 15 minutes ago. We know the play will revolve around the semipublic Juilliard "master classes" Callas taught after prematurely losing her voice, her lover, Aristotle Onassis, and her career; but, dramatically speaking, nothing yet has "happened." No student has graced the stage; no private secrets have been confessed; not a note has been sung. Faye Dunaway has effortlessly seized the stage as only a movie star playing a dead diva can do. She toys with the audience, casting a disapproving eye at noisy laughter or teasing a handful of furtive latecomers. Without plot or action, her performance becomes a study in stage presence. Every arched brow, tilt of the head, each directive to "ignore her" unleashes a new ripple of riotous affirmation: We cannot ignore you, you're Faye Dunaway, playing Maria Callas. You think we paid $47 to watch a play?
These indulgent exchanges, intrusive in any other context, here have a queer logic -- queer meaning peculiar but also in the sense of a drag queen's mocking homage to artificiality. Master Class -- especially featuring the illustrious Dunaway -- is a drag show in which we watch the creation of the spectacle of image and the pains it exacts on its medium, the human personality. At one point, a student confesses that she hoped to get some of Callas' famed "temperament" out of her lesson. That is, of course, all she can really hope to get. Callas -- bereft of voice -- is still burdened by the larger-than-life performer's personality. Yet despite her overweening self-obsession Callas tries to teach her students to forget themselves, listen to the music, and become pure vehicles for the emotion.
As the play unfurls, the self-effacement that Dunaway tries to pull off -- "I am invisible" -- becomes all the more improbable. Callas is depicted as too much of a prima donna to ever lose sight of her own monumental image. Indeed, the play is almost a monologue: As her students sing, Callas embarks on a series of fractured reminiscences over the course of which she relives the decline of her singing career and the broken love affair with Onassis. Also, the production has added meaning given Faye Dunaway and her aging stardom. Finally, the tensions between the identity of the artist and the purity of the art put the play into self-referential overdrive. Where does art come from? The selfless technique or the melodramatic temperament? And when the audience is moved by music or words, are we tapping into a deeper stream of being or simply admiring the gall of a giant ego?
Although much of the play is taken up with Callas' flashbacks, the most absorbing moments come in the simple, excruciating scenes between her and her students. The insularity of stardom cannot match the excitement of dramatic interaction between struggling characters. Even if the audience came to see Faye Dunaway, they ended up seeing four skilled performers, not one. In each of the three lessons Callas tears her students down -- reducing them to tears, vomiting, yelling -- but Dunaway's counterparts hold their own against her highness: a delightfully awkward Melinda Klump as the chubby, frilly Sophie; the self-possessed Kevin Paul Anderson as cocksure tenor Tony; and emotional firecracker Suzan Hanson as the giggling, impassioned Sharon.
In the beginning McNally gives Callas too much focus, too much theatrical status; the other characters are simply pawns for her jokes and caprices. This makes the play feel self-indulgent and static, despite Dunaway's impeccable performance. But the play gathers momentum as Callas loses her power and the students assert their identities. Sophie leaves the stage sobbing. Tony stubbornly persists and ends up awing Callas with his singing. As for Sharon, Callas concedes she has a lovely voice, but tells her she lacks that "something special ... that gift from God." In return, Sharon repeats the worst of the rumors about Callas: that she recklessly ruined her voice. "I hate people like you. You want to make the world dangerous for everybody because it was for you," Sharon cries. It is in these moments that one wishes McNally had been a little less enamored with Callas, and a little more attentive to the simmering wisdom of his fictional characters.
-- Carol Lloyd
Tossing Off
Tossing Monte. By Tess Collins. Directed by Janice Erlendson. Starring Zachary Barton, Lawrence Hecht, and Ken Sonkin. At the 450 Geary Studio Theater, 450 Geary (at Powell), through Aug. 31. Call 673-1172.
There's something faintly obscene about the title Tossing Monte, even though it only refers to the card trick you can sometimes watch hustlers play on buses through the Haight. "Tossing off" is British slang for masturbating; and a few lines in this play seem to toy with that overtone. There's the exchange: "Do you do anything other than steal?" "Yeah, I toss monte." And the unforgettable proverb, "A monte tosser never loses." (True true true. And never faces rejection.) Double entendres are no less funny when they're unintended, and I like to give the author the benefit of the doubt on these, because they lend the play dimension and wit.
Tossing Monte is about a card-tossing hustler named Jack Payne who strolls into a seedy Las Vegas nightclub with the idea of stealing it and its main act away from its manager, Rex Schultz. The main act is Gina Eden, an aging starlet and sometime lover of Schultz's who lip-syncs with a puppet to horrible lounge music because she believes she can't sing. Gina is boy-crazy at the age of maybe 35; she convinces Schultz to give Payne a job as a magician, then flirts with Payne -- pun intended, I think -- but also tries to kill herself when Schultz screws another woman. So the play finds its focus in the thorny complications of love. That would be fine if it weren't also full of maudlin speeches on the subject by Gina. "Do you deal love as easily as you deal cards?" she asks Payne, trying out a Tennessee Williams-style banter. It just hangs in the air like an awkward pose. Zachary Barton does her best with this character and even manages one honest scene -- a quietly moving monologue about Gina's first taste of show business -- but most of the lines are too cliched, and the chemistry between the players too flat, for her to cook up any real effect.
Lawrence Hecht plays Schultz as a large, cynical, Hawaiian print-wearing Vegas manager. He's the most natural player onstage, and his character casually dominates Payne until the very end, when the hustler challenges him to a game of three-card monte for the club. Nothing about this situation is believable -- why does Payne even want the club? why would Schultz give it away? -- but the card game has real suspense, if only because Ken Sonkin (who otherwise can't find a human nuance in the figure of Jack Payne) really is a magician. He tosses his cards with the grace of a street hustler, telling Schultz to "follow the red queen" and giving quick glimpses of her until all three cards lie face-down on the table. (If anyone knows how hustlers and magicians make the right card vanish, by the way, please write to me care of this paper.) The sleight of hand is supposed to reflect back on Schultz's betrayal of Gina, a trick that might work nicely if the story were more original; but the script is too self-involved to reflect anything.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Comrades in Arms
Arms and the Man. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Allen McKelvey. Starring Amy Mordecai, Lisa Maher, Michael Ray Wisely, and Steven Patterson. Presented by the American Citizens' Theater at the Speakeasy Theater, 2016 Seventh St. (at University), Berkeley, through Aug. 31. Call (415) 564-9872.
Sick of seeing late-Victorian middle-classers frolic and stuff face while the underclasses snatch crumbs? George Bernard Shaw turned to writing plays, which he declared to be "a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage." Shaw's art-qua-social-reform came with a comedy-of-manners sugar coating but a tart filling to signal audiences to social inequalities.
Director Allen McKelvey of the American Citizens' Theater resurrects one such play, Arms and the Man, where artificial boundaries -- sexual, social, even national -- fall and humanity prevails. The story is straightforward. Passionate, beautiful, moneyed Reina Petkoff (Amy Mordecai) worries whether her at-home affectations -- nose powders and readings of Gogol -- can live up to the battlefield exploits of her fiance, Sergius (Steven Patterson). While bullets fly, gender roles shift, and Reina takes up a pistol against an intruder, Capt. Bluntschli (Michael Ray Wisely), from the enemy side; after dousing Reina's romantic notions of a gallant Sergius defending the innocents of their nation, Bluntschli professes his need for some hearty bonbons and some rest and relaxation. Anxious to be a good hostess, Reina provides that and more. Sergius returns full of pomp and glory to claim his bride. The war is lost and won and affections flop from side to side.
There are other characters, like Reina's duenna, Louka (Lisa Maher), who, cut from the mold of Ibsen's Dora, refuses to play by the phallocentric, master-servant rules of the game, declaring that she has her "own will." And there's the servant Nicola, who fronts contentment with his station in life to save money for the day when he can pull himself into the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. The play's full of such heavy Issues, but McKelvey's direction (balancing the didactic with the comic scenes) along with some excellent acting (as the performers move from serious resolve to cartoonish contortions) animate Shaw's dramatic spirit.
Memorably, when Steven Patterson rubs his hands and declares to Louka that even "higher love needs relief" and she tells him to get stuffed, he goes through a whole medley of body expressions: torso twisting, eyes crossing, cheeks squeezing, ears puffing. Of course, such tomfoolery can also interfere with the audience's empathy with the characters. Occasionally, the characters' too-quick emotional transitions, as when Reina careens from fearing Bluntschli to desiring him, leave us with little that resonates. All in all, however, the laughs abound and the frames that hold up the façades of social inequality topple down.
-- Frederick Luis Aldama
Heaven and Hell
Burning Down to Heaven. Written and performed by Jennifer Bowen. At the Marsh, 1062 Valencia (at 22nd Street), Aug. 5-12. Call 826-5750.
Anne Sexton died quietly in a purring Mercury Cougar in 1974, after a turbulent, half-sane life. ("To be neurotic is, to me, fairly normal," she once wrote.) She was a friend of Sylvia Plath's, who also killed herself, and belonged to a circle of New England poets that included Robert Lowell and Maxine Kumin. Jennifer Bowen is currently an undergraduate at Boston University, where Sexton taught for years, and she's written a one-woman play about the poet by stringing together real or probable scenes from her life. The play is over, after a brief run at the Marsh, and it was flawed; but Bowen's talent for transforming herself whenever she sent Sexton through one of her stormy fugues made it worth watching.
Burning Down to Heaven presented Sexton's timid beginnings as a poet at the age of 29 (after her first suicide attempt), flashed back to choice traumatic scenes from her childhood, and followed her career through poetry readings and the Pulitzer Prize and into the garage with the Cougar. The show's main problem was that it had no focus, no solid story line. Bowen simply ran through the different faces of Anne Sexton, more or less chronologically. I counted six faces: the little girl, the drunkard, the panicked and pill-mad housewife, the sex-crazed therapy patient, the poet, and the Brahmin sophisticate. The first three were stronger than the others. Some of the poetry-reading was precious, and the sex-crazed scenes felt overenthusiastic. It's true that Sexton conducted an affair with one of her psychiatrists during their sessions; but did she really flash her whole leg and pull on a red garter to seduce him? (I mean, where'd she get the garter?) I can't find anything in my Sexton biography to support this, so I think Bowen must have invented the garter scene to "dramatize" the poet's sluttish self, a strategy that worked crudely.
The show was also full of little errors. It's cheating to have your character simply tell the audience necessary information, like the date, as Bowen did in her final tantrum; I doubt Sexton would have called Rimbaud "Rimbawd"; and the meaning of the title is unprovocatively left up to the audience's imagination. But Bowen's fuguelike intervals of the poet's madness showed flashes of a powerful talent. Her best scene had Sexton mentally transformed into a frightened, frantic girl. She talked in a babyish voice to a dream image of her father, who was about to molest her. "He comes in drunk," she chanted, "huffing and puffing -- ANNE! -- He comes in drunk -- " The scene was scary and weird, charged with sexual panic, and Bowen came back to this manic state a few times during the show. Near the end she had Sexton literally climbing the walls -- sobbing, screaming, ravaged with guilt and remorse -- for no better reason than that she'd just turned 44. These scenes had a nice balance of passion and control: an eloquent sense, like Sexton's best poetry, of the natural shape of a feeling.
-- Michael Scott Moore
