The Master Class

[deliasherman]

I shouldn't even be using my "La Loge" for this, since it isn't really going to be a review.  It can't be.  I'm too emotionally invested in the play to review it with anything like objectivity.  You see, it's about a teacher who feels passionately about what she's teaching, trying to convey that passion--not to mention the necessity for knowing

Comments

[csecooney]

I remember that, early in my high school career, an opera-loving friend of the family gave me a copy of Master Class to read. I've always loved Terence McNally because of it. A few years later, that friend took me to the world premiere of Dead Man Walking, the opera, for which Terence McNally had written the lyrics. My only experience of Maria Callas is through reading that play.

[stephanieburgis]

Ohhh, I love that play. I've never seen it performed, but I went through a period of reading all of Terence MacNally's plays, and even as just a script on paper, it was so powerful. (And having gone to a music conservatory, the dynamic was SO uncomfortably familiar and true...)

[carbonel]

I saw that play many years ago at Ravinia, and I always wondered at the choice of basing the teacher on a real person instead of a made-up one, even if it were transparently based on someone else (ala Citizen Kane). Especially if it's a caricature of that real person, it seems wrong to me.

I wonder what Callas would have thought of the play. And whether there were any issues with her estate about it.