McNally's "Golden Age' by PTC (3rd review)

If you see Philadelphia Theatre Company's production of Golden Age, I offer one piece of advice: Go in the spirit of Bellini's The Puritans and forgive Terrence McNally everything.

Dismiss any bewilderment over the sudden bouts of direct address (a fault perhaps only in Austin Pendleton's direction). Remember that they're opera singers when you hear big, dramatic pronouncements—"All love dies," for instance— that traditionally populate the dialogue of teenagers. And, yes, even indulge the clichéd catfights between the two soprano divas that perhaps— mirroring Tebaldi and Callas a century later— really did occur.

In return for your magnanimous spirit, you will receive a bounteous gift of theater that from the first moments liberates itself from the fetters of the stage and soars into the magical realm that only theater can make possible.

With the setting and characters of Golden Age, McNally the playwright first achieves a minor triumph. Here, he restricted his imagination to known quantities: the January 24, 1835 world premiere of Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani (The Puritans) at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris. The cast includes those on hand that night: Bellini and his lover, the four principal singers (referred to then and now as the "Puritans Quartet"), the legendary Spanish soprano Maria Malibran, and the composer Rossini.

A world as rich as opera

In a rare and brilliantly executed conceit (helped immeasurably by Ryan Rumery's sound design), we witness the backstage preening and posturing that occur while the opera itself— almost in real time— plays to a house beyond a veiled curtain of Santo Loquasto's gloriously gilded set. And from this historical situation, McNally unravels a world as rich as the libretto of any opera.

Granted, you might reply, that's his job. Yes, but think of how even the greatest playwrights fail when borrowing from history (Antony and Cleopatra, anyone?). McNally, by contrast, lulls us into a dream with Bellini's first lines that speak back to us the translation of the aria being sung offstage.

Initial backstage concerns of "Where are we eating after the show?" yield to battles that rage between singers and composers (and, by extension, actors and playwrights). We hear a singer condemn a repurposed cabaletta minutes after performing it, jockeying between tenors and baritones over who should appear in Bellini's next opera (the never completed King Lear), and, throughout, enough insider gossip to ensure that opera-lovers won't feel cheated for a moment.

Amadeus reversed

McNally tethers all these strands around Bellini, in whom he constructs a converse to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Instead of the hack Salieri undermining Mozart, here we experience the rivalry from the genius's perspective. Bellini rips on Donizetti's flowery, horribly-titled "compositions that would embarrass a student" and denigrates the operas of a past master (Rossini) lauded for recycling old works instead of creating new ones.

For his part, Jeffrey Carlson's Bellini intermingles petulance, despondency and vanity with a honeyed, lyrical cadence that matches the maestro's compositions; and Marc Kudisch's Tamburini, even when deflated, delivers the fantastically vulgar machismo that proves why the great rakes of opera all sing baritone.

Pendleton's direction lets the transitions cascade with a lush texture, and PTC's production values once again prove why McNally should continue to stage his world premieres in Philadelphia.

McNally confronts mortality

But it's in Golden Age's themes and content that McNally achieves the triumph of an artist in full mastery of his craft. Through Bellini, McNally uses opera as an analogy to express his theories on art, on motivations for creating and performing, and, after a life spent writing works for the stage, to examine his own mortality via that of a composer cut down at 33 by tuberculosis.

Bellini decries that no production has ever voiced what he hears in his head, complains about shifting tastes that he's "more valued for what I do than what I am," and rails against the poverty of reality by insisting, "Art shouldn't imitate life; it should be life."

Does McNally provide any genuinely new insights? No. But the poetic language and his illuminating of the ethos of every artist elevate this play into a work of pure transcendence.

Jealousy among giants

Golden Age may show artists at their most petty and despicable, but it also crystallizes the kind of generosity that outstrips all their faults. Tolstoy may have challenged Turgenev to a duel; Rousseau may have hated Voltaire; and who knows which living playwrights provoke McNally's ire (I'd guess Mamet). But when McNally's Bellini praises "Una Furtiva Lagrima" (from Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amour) by admitting, "I would give the entire score of my [opera] The Pirates to compose that one aria," we feel the tremendous reverence that can only exist between giants of the spirit.

Certainly, McNally's script could stand an edit. But I disagree with anyone who claims it went on too long. Instead, I'd argue that we should— like Shakespeare in his Tempest or Pirandello in Six Characters— encourage all our great playwrights to reflect on the world they have continually reinvented and furthered, and indulge them in looking back at the richness of experience they have wrought through art and in art, from somewhere behind the curtain. ♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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