Imagined history in Terrence McNally’s Golden Age. Photo: Joan Marcus
What the topic of the play does dictate is more structural, particularly when it is biographical in nature. In Golden Age, which takes place backstage on the opening night of Bellini’s I Puritani, the characters that could interact were primarily predetermined by events in January 1835: they were either on-stage for the opera, or backstage – and therefore on-stage for Golden Age.
Figuring out how to move the play along with the characters he was allowed became something of a “jigsaw puzzle” for McNally. There was no way for the opera’s quartet to appear in the climactic scene of Golden Age, for example, because they needed to appear for the climax of I Puritani. So the remaining characters – Bellini and the man and woman he loved – were able to wrap things up among themselves, which was more fitting for the play’s conclusion than the comical quartet.
Of course, there is a limit to how much is known of Golden Age’s real-life characters. Some of the play is fact: Rubini really was insecure about his high notes; Maria Malibran was famous for her temperamental nature. But these are personalities from two centuries ago, “so you draw on what’s a suggestion in a book,” McNally says. “Most of the personality I’ve given them is my own invention. This play was written as much by my imagination as from my reverence for these people.”
That same imagination led him to use 21st-century language in Golden Age, which gives the play a charmingly anachronistic quality. That decision, McNally says, was the solution to a problem of style. “I started to write this play about 20 years ago. I wrote about ten to 15 pages and it sounded like a bad translation from French,” he recalls. “I had them talking very formally, in very stately English.”
Then McNally had an epiphany: why would a handful of 20- or 30-somethings, close friends and lovers of one another, speak so formally? “They probably talked in Italian the same way we speak today, with colloquialisms and four-letter words,” he says. So he wrote the dialogue as young artists might talk now. “It freed me. I’m very happy with how I solved the language problem – at least how I think I solved the language problem.”
This is perhaps characteristic for a playwright who argues that a writer must “introduce the audience to characters that they enjoy getting to know, hold their interest and try to say something of interest. It’s about communication, and if the audience is not interested, that’s a failure of communication.”
So what drove McNally to write Golden Age? What did he want to communicate? The drama itself was “quite a departure for me in many, many ways,” he reflects. “What led me to the story was that I thought it would be fun to imagine what goes on behind the curtain.” But what the story became moved beyond that.“Golden Age is about the sacrifices people make to create,” McNally explains. “It’s about mortality. It’s about the arts and what it means to be an artist. We all wonder: are we being heard? Are we contributing something that will endure when we’re gone?” he says, almost self-referentially.
If McNally has any lingering worries about his own sustaining contributions, he has a 50-year body of work to ponder over. And there is more to come: And Away We Go, a new play opening in the spring, takes another peek backstage, this time at theatre productions spanning several centuries. Beyond that, “I certainly have a long list of ideas,” he says. “I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen next.”
However, one thing is clear: he’s reluctant to stray too close to what he’s already done. “I don’t like to be accused of writing the same play over and over,” he states. Which means no turning the trilogy of which Golden Age is part into a quartet: “I have a feeling I might not write another play about opera.”
Golden Age is at New York City Center, Stage 1, until 13th January. You can read our review of the play here.