LEGENDS OF THE FALL

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

HERE'S A SOLITARY WOMAN, NOT young, who holds the stage completely. She's solitary whether or not others stand beside her, for she glows at the center of your vision, and those at the periphery disappear. If Hollywood is notorious as a place where actresses over 40, even the most talented, have trouble finding work, Broadway at the moment seems to set them at a premium. Back on New York stages this fall, their radiance intact, are Carol Channing, 74, in Hello, Dolly!, Julie Andrews, 60, in Victor/Victoria and Carol Burnett, 62, in Moon over Buffalo.

But Dolly and Victor are musicals; Moon is a farce. For those seeking weightier drama, we have a pair of more recent arrivals: Zoe Caldwell, 62, in Terrence McNally's Master Class and Uta Hagen, 76, in Nicholas Wright's Mrs. Klein. These two actresses have given their professional lives to the theater--which has in turn gratefully given them a total of five Tony Awards and the evident right to have the phrase "the legendary" prefixed to their names.

Master Class has Caldwell playing Maria Callas not as singer but as instructor, imperiously advising--when she can stop talking about herself--a trio of aspiring opera stars. Although her own days onstage are over, she remains the most famous Greek woman in the world, and she has the most famous Greek man, Aristotle Onassis, for her lover--or had him, until his eye veered to President Kennedy's widow. At times, McNally arranges for the classroom to dissolve away and for Callas to address us in private monologue, revealing a tremulous woman whose fame provides some compensation for, but little insulation from, heartbreak.

Caldwell scissors across the stage in lean and elegant black. Although she does not sing a note, she does a brilliant job of suggesting--with the turn of a hand, the tilt of her head--the minor adjustments of someone attending to an inner genius; you don't doubt that if she could only transfer what's inside her to her pupils, they would sing like angels. And when Callas' voice is piped in--a true angel, soaring out of the loudspeakers--Caldwell, her conduit, suddenly embodies the paradox at the heart of every magnificent diva: someone who might be thought triply vulnerable--high-pitched, solitary, female--emerges as an invincible spirit.

Her performance is strong enough to make you overlook the play's shortcomings. Master Class has a less gratifying shape than what may be McNally's best play, also Callas inspired, The Lisbon Traviata (it's also less well constructed than last year's uneven Love! Valour! Compassion!, which nevertheless won a Tony last year for best play). There's no organic reason for Master Class to run the two acts it does; the second act doesn't deepen--it merely extends. And McNally's attempt to drive it toward an old-fashioned theatrical climax (one of the students ultimately mutinies against Callas' bullying) feels contrived. Even so, to watch so able an actress in so rich a role is an unfailing pleasure, whether for one act or two--or 10.

Like Callas, the "Mrs." of Mrs. Klein is a historical figure: Melanie Klein, the Austrian-born pioneering child psychologist. The drama is set in London, as the Eastern Europe that Klein has fled falls under Hitler's shadow. The play depicts an intellectual tug-of-war between Klein and her daughter (Laila Robins), who is also a psychologist. Unpredictable assistance to both sides is supplied by Amy Wright, who is quite winning as a jittery-eyed acolyte of Klein's.

The drama opens with Klein's life near collapse. She has just learned of her son's death in a mysterious climbing accident. Step by contentious step, her daughter leads Klein toward the possibility that the son committed suicide. Pitiable and monstrous by turns, Hagen brings to each new revelation a miraculous range of responses. There's a moment when she becomes a woman visibly torn by overwhelming and irreconcilable emotions: while she cringes at the prospect that a life she gave birth to has extinguished itself, she can't stop reaching out--with a born analyst's hunger for a concealed truth, the uglier the better--for some devastating confirmation.

Mrs. Klein, like Master Class, has its defects. Everything is once again tied up too neatly at the finish, in betrayal of the open-endedness that psychology embodies. But such complaints are, so to speak, satisfying dissatisfactions--the sort of grumbling that arises only when the material is fully engaging. After both Master Class and Mrs. Klein, you leave the theater feeling you've been wholly drawn in.