Golden Age
by Terrence McNally
Manhattan Theatre Club,
City Center Stage 1
Dec. 4, 2012–Jan. 27, 2013
POSSIBLY the most moving moment in Terrence McNally’s new play occurs when composer Vincenzo Bellini sits backstage listening to the premiere of what would prove to be his final opera, I Puritani. Overcome by the beauty of the music being performed on stage, he lapses suddenly into a daze and is oblivious to his lover, Francisco Floimio, with whom he has been arguing. Accustomed to Bellini’s mood swings, Florimo recalls in a dramatic monologue his waking one morning during their stay in a hotel on Lake Como to find an unkempt and nightshirt-clad Bellini seated at the piano, completing the composition now being played onstage, an aria that begins “Love brings me to your side in triumph and joy.” Although he aches to embrace his lover, Florimo refrains from doing so lest he disrupt Bellini’s reverie.
This is also the most revealing scene in McNally’s play, for both men are filled with a longing that cannot be fulfilled. Florimo loves Bellini passionately but can never be allowed inside his lover’s creative process, which is the part of Bellini that fascinates him most. He is condemned to witness, but never to be a part of, this process. Nor can he ever fully possess the charismatic Bellini sexually. As one member of the opera company chortles (with a possible nod to Edward Albee’s The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia?): “Bellini’s in love with everyone: women, men, I’m sure there’s a goat somewhere!” Bellini, for his part, is tortured that no matter how effective his singers are, he will never hear his music performed with the same subtlety as he hears it in his head. He’s tormented that even as he premieres what he believes is his greatest opera, his increasingly tubercular condition leaves him wracked by painful coughing. The blood that he spews into his handkerchief symbolizes how little time he has left to begin work on his ambitious next opera. McNally uses opera to dramatize the human ache for gratification that perpetually lies just outside one’s grasp. The tenor Rubini strains to reach “the F above High C, the most feared note in opera,” and dares further to hope that Bellini’s next opera will challenge him to reach “a G. Too bad there’s not an H!” For McNally, opera signifies an endless yearning that proves to be “an act of faith. Of trust. Of love.” But however they aspire to transcend their limitations, Bellini and his performers are firmly rooted in the muck of human mortality, impatient for an intermission when they can enjoy a full meal, driven by their hunger for applause and fame, and sexually aroused by the nature of performance. The romantic entanglements enacted onstage are repeated with variations backstage. Rubini yearns for soprano Giulia Grisi, yet she disappoints him by revealing that she’s engaged to a rival tenor. Tamburini, the sexually prolific baritone, embarrasses himself when he makes known his infatuation with the fiery soprano Maria Malibran, who has come to town to continue her affair with Bellini’s detested rival, the composer Gaetano Donizetti. And Bellini’s love for Florimo, his current amour, is threatened by his feelings for a past lover (the same Malibran), which are rekindled by her surprise appearance backstage in the course of the performance. Golden Age is a provocative meditation on the overlapping nature of sexual love and artistic creation. Both the artist and the lover strain to grasp what is ineffable, creating in one’s mind a beauty that can never be fully realized, much less tangibly enjoyed. In each case, it is the distance that leads one on. The two impulses are on display in Donizetti’s “One Furtive Tear,” which Bellini describes as the most beautiful aria ever written, and which perfectly translates into music the hunger for something that one knows one can never possess. Not surprisingly, Bellini says that he aspires to compose an opera “that cannot be performed. What they [other composers]call art is artifice. No, what I call art is as free, as wild, as unmanageable as life”—and love—itself. There is a rich, autumnal quality to McNally’s play. “Why would anyone willingly leave the rest of his life?” Bellini asks rhetorically before enumerating the simple pleasures that he will miss when he’s dead. The premiere of his newest work has not concluded, yet he’s already planning his next opera, unable to accept the limitations that life and art have placed upon him—limitations revealed by the blood in his handkerchief. One senses that there’s something personal at work here. Seventeen years ago McNally commented that Master Class—which addresses both how impossible it is to live in a world without art and what an artist must sacrifice in order to achieve success—was the most autobiographical play he’d yet written. Golden Age seems even more personal. Malibran calls attention to Bellini’s birthday (Nov. 3), which coincidentally happens to be McNally’s. Bellini seems to be McNally’s Prospero and Golden Age his late-career meditation upon the power and limitations of the theater. “What a strange vocation has chosen me!” Bellini complains as he listens backstage to the singers performing his opera, “to bare my heart in music and then depend on strangers to decide what those notes mean.” McNally is generally well served by this Manhattan Theatre Club production. Lee Pace is effectively neurasthenic as Bellini, overflowing with sexual and/or artistic energy one moment and collapsing with physical or emotional exhaustion the next. Curiously, he proves least effective in those scenes in which Bellini lapses into anxious confusion or retreats into reverie. Of the four singers, Ethan Phillips is most effective as the often ignored yet quietly professional Lablache, whose age and humble position as the company bass free him to observe and comment shrewdly on the excesses of others. As Florimo, Will Rogers is earnest and handsome, yet a sexual cipher: it is difficult to imagine him enjoying the drunken nights of wild passion with Pace’s Bellini on Lake Como that he describes in his monologue. While I found Bebe Neuwirth’s interpretation of soprano Maria Malibran, a 19th-century forerunner of Maria Callas, to be less than fully fleshed-out, this disappointment is counterbalanced by F. Murray Abraham’s cameo appearance as an aged Gioacchino Rossini, who generously comes backstage before the opera’s close to congratulate Bellini on his success. Abraham—who starred in two early McNally plays, The Ritz and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune—joined rehearsals of Golden Age just a week before previews began, replacing an actor who had fallen ill. All the sadness in the world seems contained in Abraham’s acknowledgment that he (as Rossini) no longer composes because “I got tired. I ran out of things to say.” The simplicity with which Abraham delivers the line suggests a quiet resignation that has not been easily won. Would that director Walter Bobbie had been able to elicit such exquisite nuance from all the members of the cast! Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas and editor of the academic quarterly ANQ.
