Masterclass
1–13 September
fortyfivedownstairs.com
 |
| Maria Mercedes in the Sydney season of Masterclass. Photo by Clare Hawley |
The 2014 Melbourne Green Room Award–winning production of Master Class
by Terrance McNallyhas finished its Sydney Hayes Theatre season and is returning to Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs on 1 September. Before
heading beginning rehearsals, Lammin spoke to me about how they
first approached the work, what it was like to be so successful, and how
they’re approaching the remount.
The production won Maria Mercedes a Best Performer award and Daniel Lammin his first nomination as Best Director.
The
play opened on Broadway in 1995. It’s fiction, but is inspired by a
series of recorded master classes that Callas presented at Julliard in
New York in 1971 when she was 54.
By then, she had experienced the best and the worst that fame and talent bring; from being the icon and
La Divina to
being judged on her weight and relationships. Lammin said, “she touched
the divine, looked into the heart of the universe and heard what it
sounded like, and no one comes back from that unscathed.”
She died of a heart attack in 1977 and is still iconised.
 |
| Daniel Lammin. Photo by Sarah Walker |
How do you approach a re-mount knowing the expectations that follow such a successful first season?
My philosophy returning to
Master Class
was to regard the original season as unfinished. When I last spoke to
Maria about the remount, both of us agreed that we had further to go
with it, both in terms of her performance and with the production in
general.
Master Class is a deceptively dense play; its
characterisation of Callas is enormous and the supporting characters are
far more complex than they first appear.
Even with all the accolades and responses we got last year, we still wanted to go back and keep digging deeper.
How
we approach that comes down to our own expectations of this new season.
Not only will we be bringing a year’s worth of pondering and gained
knowledge to it, but we also have two new cast members (Blake Bowden and
Teresa Duddy), which basically means a completely new second act.
Because
my original approach was to use the experiences of the original singers
to inform their performances and interpretations of their characters,
these new cast members will bring a whole new energy to the show and
push myself and the rest of the cast into new territory. It’ll prevent
us from resting on our laurels because there will be new dynamics and
voices in the room that are totally unlike the original singers. The
last thing I want them to do is imitate what was done before; I’m far
more interested in what they have to bring.
That said, it is daunting and a little terrifying coming back to it given how well the first season went.
I’m
still a young emerging director, so its success was overwhelming for
me, and I’m a little nervous that I won’t be able to recapture whatever
lightning in a bottle we got last year in our state of panic and passion
in getting it on in the first place.
I don’t want to let down the audience, the cast and crew or the original production.
What gives me the drive with returning to
Master Class
though is that I’m not interested in repeating myself or just rehashing
what we did before. Of course, we want to remount it because it was
successful and people wanted to see it again (or at all), but
artistically I had no interest in pulling it out of the box and plonking
it on stage.
The play addresses so many things I feel very
passionately and personally about – the role of art in a society, the
sacrifices it requires, how unforgiving it is, the role of women in the
arts, a celebration of the powerful women who brought me up and my
Mediterranean heritage – and I didn’t feel at all satisfied that I’d
said what I needed to say clearly enough.
I want it to
be just as fresh and dangerous, and to continue to push the play, the
cast and the audience even further. If we’re going to do it again, I
want to work the show and myself even harder than before.
 |
| Photo by Clare Hawley |
Not being an opera singer, how did you work with the singers
to integrate their first-hand experience of master classes and the needs
of the piece?
In past productions, the singers in
Master Class
had usually been played by musical theatre actors. One of the things
the producer Cameron Lukey was determined to do was use actual opera
singers who could perform the arias with their necessary power. Not only
did I see this as a creatively exciting decision, but also a tremendous
resource for me to use in developing and rehearsing the show.
I’m
a naturally inquisitive person, so when it came to approaching the
opera, I just let that part of my personality take over for a bit. I
have a passionate love of classical music, but my knowledge of opera is
limited, so I started by just sitting and chatting with each of the
singers about themselves. Why did they become an opera singer? What is
their relationship with their career? How did they feel about their
industry and its internal politics?
This led to talking about
their own experiences of master classes, both as observers and
performers. I would note down every little detail, from where they would
stand in relation to the master running the class to the usual mistakes
people would make.
We also discussed the differences between their experiences and the
play itself. This was the stuff we used and referenced on the floor,
throwing in tidbits to add to the realism of the piece.
This also
meant that, rather than imposing anything on the singers (none of whom
in the original production had ever acted in a play before), we were
making their characters and performances more personal. I was also lucky
to have Lukey, who trained as an opera singer, who was able to clarify
and educate me on the more technical side of opera.
I wasn’t
interested in making a piece of theatre with Callas as the absolute
centre of attention. I wanted every character to be as rich and full as
her, and knew that my best resource was the singers themselves.
As
a director, I use the personality of the actor to help them find and
inform their character; especially in this case where I was a novice
entering their world. I wanted to be respectful of this industry and the
people working in it, and to give the singers the opportunity to share
not just their love of opera, but the impossibly hard work and
dedication that goes into it.
I wanted
Master Class to be as much a celebration of them as it was of Callas.
 |
| Photo by Clare Hawley |
Did you (and Maria) listen to the recorded Callas master classes or did you approach it as a piece of writing?
Maria
and I both took different approaches in our preparation for the show.
Maria buried herself in research, reading countless books and
biographies of Callas, while I decided to keep my research to a minimum
and focus directly on the play text itself.
I broke it right down
dramaturgically, right down to its punctuation, and studied the
structure of the play and the rhythms of Callas’s dialogue. This meant
that Maria would bring her mountains of knowledge into the room and
allow that to inform her performance and I concerned myself with the
technical side, never allowing her to put a pause or a comma wrong. I
felt that was far more useful, so we had a balance of biographical
knowledge and dramaturgical understanding of the play itself.
What became our greatest resource though were the recordings of Callas, particularly those specified for use in the play.
What
set Callas apart was the unrelenting honesty with which she sang, less
interested with technical skill than with expressing truth. That’s why
her voice is so powerful, because her soul is in her singing, and this
was a big clue for us to unlocking the ideas in McNally’s text. We also
had hours of recordings from the actual master classes the play was
inspired by, so we could listen to how Callas approached the students.
It’s not verbatim in any way, but it was an interesting document to
complement our understanding of the play.
 |
| Photo by Clare Hawley |
How did you work with your Maria to become a Maria that was both Callas and Mercedes?
One
of the rules I imposed on the show was that we weren’t doing what I
called “the gay fantasia of Maria Callas” or anything that revealed in
any melodrama or camp. She’s such an icon and a caricature, but I wasn’t
interested in that, and I didn’t think the play itself was either.
We
were far more interested in the soul of this woman than of doing a
convincing imitation. We never talked about recreating her mannerisms or
voice. We let the text itself and the given circumstances of Callas’s
background inform us.
Like the singers, I also used Mercedes herself as a resource, drawing
on her Greek background and her own experiences as a performer. It was
very important to us both that we preserved Callas’s Greek heritage,
because she’s rarely played in productions of
Master Class by a
Greek actor. It also helped that my family background is partly
Maltese, so we both understood what it meant to be Mediterranean, so her
put-downs and blunt comments weren’t about being a bitch but about that
wonderful bluntness that Mediterranean women have.
We also spoke a
lot about women in positions of power, the sexual politics between men
and women and how threatening Callas would have been to the patriarchal
opera world of the time.
Her uncompromising position as both an
artist and a woman had an enormous effect on her professionally and
romantically. This is where I thought
Master Class was quite a
violent and disturbing play, and Maria totally embraced that, so that in
her monologues at the end of each act we went for something more
visceral and uncomfortable. We wanted people to walk away from
Master Class not
with a set of quippy facts they could rattle off, but a deep
understanding of the soul of this woman; one both immense and totally
broken.
I have this driving need in being a theatre maker. With everything I
do, I’m trying to hear the sound of the universe. I know that sounds
ridiculous, but I want to hear the forces at work around us in all their
beauty and their violence, and theatre is the tool that my inquisitive
mind chooses to use to try and hear it. Callas was one of those people
who actually heard it, and you know this from listening to her sing.
She
touched the divine, looked into the heart of the universe and heard
what it sounded like, and no one comes back from that unscathed. For
Maria and I, we want the audience to catch a glimpse of that, a woman
caught in a awe-inspiring and terrible ecstasy that has made her divine
and ripped her apart.
It’s an impossible task to set ourselves, but it was what we saw when we read the play and listened to Callas sing, and that’s what we wanted to give the audience.
This was on
AussieTheatre.com.
