Terrence McNally insists that he did not intend to make Maria Callas a subject in his new play, Golden Age.

When I tell him that I see Maria Malibran - a strong presence in the play - as a surrogate for Callas, he says that was not his plan. I believe him, but it remains clear that Callas's art is a passion of McNally's that permeates much of what he writes, even when he does not consciously will it.

Golden Age is set backstage at the world premiere of Bellini's I Puritani in Paris in 1835. "What I really intended was to write about three things - the composer, audiences and singers," the playwright told me. We talked in the lobby of the theater on the night of Golden Age's world premiere, then continued our discussion on the phone.

"Bellini always interested me because we share the same birthday," he pointed out. It was the third of November. Bellini was born on that date in 1801, and McNally in 1938. (He says that a major on-line biography shows his year of birth to be 1939, and that is incorrect.) "I love Bellini's music and I think it is under-appreciated."

The connection with Callas again becomes noticeable, because it was she who brought public attention to the operas of Bellini after a long period of neglect. For a generation, Norma was the only Bellini opera known to most music-lovers and only rarely was that one staged. In the entire history of the Metropolitan Opera only four sopranos attempted the role before Callas: Lilli Lehmann in the 1890s, Rosa Ponselle in the 1920s, Gina Cigna in the 1930s and Zinka Milanov in 1944 and 1954.

McNally discovered opera via radio in his childhood home in Corpus Christie, Texas. "I heard live broadcasts of Callas singing in Mexico City, relayed from there through the Mexican station in Monterey." He became a fan, and at the age of 17 traveled to New York to see Callas's Met debut as Norma. The soprano re-introduced three other Bellini operas: La Sonnambula, Il Pirata and I Puritani, on recordings and in live performances. Through this exposure, McNally became a fan of the entire Bellini ouvre.

A decade later, Joan Sutherland started singing those operas, with a big voice and spectacular high notes and now many artists perform them, but it was Callas who was the initiator and the inspiration.

Little is known about Bellini's personal life. McNally read the composer's letters and says they are like newspaper reports, "full of details about the weather, who attended, and so on, but not much about his feelings," so McNally had to imagine what the man was like. He was forced to invent Bellini's lines.

The playwright knows that Bellini's friend, Francesco Florimo, was not there for the opening of I Puritani but he wrote him into the script because the two men were very close and normally traveled together. McNally also acknowledges that there's no evidence that the singer Maria Malibran attended, but he chose to show her sneaking into the performance and coming backstage where her presence disturbs the soprano star of the evening, Giulia Grisi.

This sets up dramatic confrontation between the soprano rivals. McNally uses the women's lines to present the arguments of two contrasting points of view. Malibran represents what Callas epitomized later - the importance of the words as the starting point in interpretation, and in dramatic expression. Grisi represents those who put beauty of voice first. She says scornfully about Malibran: "I don't know why she asks so many questions; I just sing the notes that are written!"

This line draws appreciative laughs but, on the whole, Malibran's point of view gets more favorable attention in the play's script. It's natural that the man who became an author of stage dramas would favor Malibran's approach. It also is clear that theater-lovers will recognize these arguments from the Callas speeches in Master Class.

Malibran speaks as if she is the misunderstood defender of what composers intend. She says that she delves to find the truth inside whatever she performs. She even recites the text of Puritani's big aria, much as Callas did in McNally's Master Class. His Malibran talks about how she has lost her voice and has come to Paris to die, which Callas did. So can anyone deny the presence of Callas in this new play?

The playwright tells me that he wanted to demonstrate that singers had the power and the responsibility to give new operas an enduring life, or conversely, to doom them. "A composer puts the notes on paper but the singer gives them life."

As McNally wrote his script he took a cue from the fact that Bellini wrote an alternate version of I Puritani which was more within Malibran's singing range, and he wanted Malibran to perform it. Apparently she never did. The composer died eight months after Puritani's premiere, at the age of 33. Malibran died one year later, to the day.

Bellini died of intestinal disease. McNally's script, however, shows him coughing up blood. This suggests consumption or tuberculosis like Boheme's Mimi, or the real-life tragedy of Enrico Caruso who died of complications from pleurisy. Probably McNally thought it would appear more dramatic on stage than a Bellini who clutched his abdomen.

McNally explains that he used his imagination and hopes that audiences don't think that everything on stage is literally true. I love his flights of fancy in Master Class, as when the walls of the classroom disappear and we are in Callas's memory of her triumphs in opera houses. So I am happy when Terrence goes beyond the mundane aspects in Golden Age and imaginatively explores the big issues of how a great interpretation can make you "see the music inside the music" and "hear the passion of life."

Those are his lines. And they are the soul of his new play.