`Master' Role Means Yet Another Rebirth For Faye Dunaway

--------------- Theater preview ---------------

"Master Class," starring Faye Dunaway, plays at the Paramount Theatre Jan. 5-18. Tickets are $23-45; 292-ARTS.

Persuasive acting is rarely a matter of simply playing oneself. Yet you can't help notice that Faye Dunaway shares a few things in common with the character she'll soon portray in Seattle: the late operatic superdiva, Maria Callas.

Like Callas, the iconic figure in Terrence McNally's hit Broadway drama "Master Class," the Florida-bred Dunaway rose swiftly from humble origins to global celebrity.

Like Callas, she was born with talent oozing from her pores, and developed a flair for glamour and high drama. Like Callas, she loved hard, was married and divorced. And both female stars earned reputations as tempestuous prima donnas - artistic perfectionists who could be hell on wheels when crossed.

Such similarities might lend some extra credibility to Dunaway's "Master Class" performance. She was hailed by critics when the play's first national tour premiered in Boston recently. It comes to the Paramount Theatre Jan. 5-18.

McNally's Tony Award-winning 1995 drama fictionalizes a true incident: the imperious, impassioned, middle-aged Callas conducting a tutorial for three aspiring young opera singers, before a select audience at New York's Julliard School of Music.

Ask Dunaway how she prepared for the demanding part, and she answers, "I think my life experiences have prepared me. The accessibility of all those areas of pain and passion. I'm having a wonderful time with the performance because it's just this endless investigation. The spaces are there, the words are there, the feelings are right there."

Take note, however, that Dunaway is a much hardier survivor than the fragile lady she enacts and (in a few respects) resembles. Callas died in 1977 at 53, heartsick and bereft after the end of her singing career and the death of her longtime lover, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

At 55, Dunaway is happily on her own, and just getting her second wind as an actress. Still honey-haired and gorgeous, with high, silky cheekbones and long legs to die for, the Oscar-winning performer (honored for her magnetic turn as a ruthless television executive in "Network") doesn't only headline the road version of "Master Class." She also bought the movie rights, and will produce and star in the film.

With her stop-and-go career in gear again, and her cherished son Liam now in his teens, Dunaway swears she's entered her prime.

"I'm in the best place I've ever been in, in terms of clarity, energy, strength, commitment and passion," she emphasized in a phone interview from Boston, speaking in that unmistakeable low, throaty voice.

"I'm excited by the future and the present. I'm doing better work than I ever have before. And I really want to take it to the limit."

Dunaway is busier professionally than she's been in years. She looked radiant last year opposite a playful Marlon Brando in the comedy "Don Juan De Marco." She had a tasty role in the recent John Grisham suspense tale "The Chamber," and copped an Emmy for her work in a 1994 episode of TV's "Columbo."

A plunge into a TV sitcom (1993's dismal "It Had to Be You") bottomed out. But Dunaway's autobiography, "Looking for Gatsby" (written with Betsy Sharkey), was welcomed last year as a cut above most celeb memoirs. And it was a model of decorum, compared to many - especially Dunaway's discreet accounts of her life with two ex-husbands (rocker Peter Wolf and photographer Terry O'Neill) and her love affairs with various other men, including Marcello Mastroianni. (Dunaway, interviewed the day after Mastroianni's death, will only say of the Italian film star, "He was a great actor, a very special human being, and we were good friends at one point.")

From Boston, Dunaway tells you, "I'm not an easy person and I don't pretend to be. I like to go for high excellence all the time. So I'm not always a piece of cake. I can be demanding."

But the glamorous actress who made berets trendy (by sporting one in "Bonnie and Clyde"), and whose tailored '40s garb in "Chinatown" incited another craze, says she's striving now for a "simpler life."

"The glamour's fun from time to time. It's like playing dress-up. But I like to be accessible. I am accessible, and want to play accessible women."

Interviewing Dunaway, you get both personas: the thoughtful artist. And the frenzied celebrity, who abruptly breaks off the conversation five times to take other calls - including one from her priest. ("I'm becoming a Catholic," she explains.)

Dunaway specified in advance that two subjects were off limits.

The first, for legal reasons, was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Boulevard." Cast as Norma Desmond in the American premiere, Dunaway got dumped by Lloyd Webber before rehearsals began, in favor of Glenn Close. Dunaway sued, and won an unspecified cash settlement for her pains.

The second: "Mommie Dearest," the campy 1981 film chronicle of Joan Crawford's maternal failings that, Dunaway reports in her memoir, "hurt my career" when "the hard, brittle persona of Joan Crawford. . . grafted itself onto me."

On other topics, Dunaway applauds the trend that "actresses past 30 and 40 are having wonderful careers again." She delights in returning to her first love, live theater. ("I got my start at Lincoln Center, and I've tried to keep up my stage appearances, because film demands all your acting technique, while theater gives you more of it.")

And she extols "Master Class," which she'll tour for the next year.

"When I read the play, and saw Zoe Caldwell's wonderful performance in the Broadway version, I was so struck by the writing," Dunaway notes. "Then I began to investigate Callas, and realized she was the Eleanora Duse of opera - not a ham at all, but someone with big strength and very big talent."

Though mostly acclaimed by drama reviewers, McNally's script drew complaints from some music critics who insisted Callas was a kinder, gentler teacher at Julliard sessions than the play suggests.

Dunaway waves off their cavils. "I listened to the audiotapes of her teaching, and she was very, very clear with the students, but very moving and inspiring as well. She may have been a little less sharp than in the play, but she didn't let the singers get away with anything. Terrence says if she had, she would've encouraged mediocrity and done them great disservice."

For research, Dunaway "watched a lot of film of Callas singing. She was often immobile onstage, and made very simple hand gestures. I've studied how she held herself, with the diaphragm more elevated than usual. And she had a specific walk - a stride, really."

Though the crafty technician in Dunaway seizes on such external traits, it is obvious the role hits her close to home, too.

"I think of Callas as a great artist and a very special human being, strong and passionate and vulnerable," says the veteran star. "Talking with Terrence, I realized the play is mostly about art and what it's like to live that kind of life and have that kind of a career."

"It's not as easy as it looks," Dunaway stresses. "You see this stern, tough, determined person who wants to push these students and not take any compromise. But then you see her vulnerability as a woman. It's a fascinating look at an artist, and an accurate one."