Entertainment

Matter of ‘import’

Manhattan Theater Club, long an engine of new and ambitious plays, is getting into the risk-averse import business.

The nonprofit, taxpayer-subsidized company recently opened Lee Hall‘s “The Pitmen Painters” at its flagship Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The production was brought over lock, stock and barrel from London’s National Theatre.

Now comes word that MTC is raiding the Kennedy Center, snapping up a recent revival of Terrence McNally‘s star vehicle “Master Class” — lock, stock and Tyne Daly.

Daly is in negotiations to reprise her acclaimed turn as Maria Callas on Broadway this summer, says Lynne Meadow, MTC’s artistic director, adding: “It’s a little early, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it will happen, but we hope to have Tyne in ‘Master Class’ at the Friedman in June.”

A Tony-winning hit in 1996, “Master Class” portrays the great opera diva and monstre sacre toward the end of her life, coaching and excoriating aspiring singers at Juilliard. It’s full of snappy one-liners, high-toned gossip — Callas slept with Aristotle Onassis, after all — and melodramatic flashbacks.

Callas was originally played by Zoe Caldwell, who won a Tony.

Faye Dunaway played the part on tour, kicking up some priceless gossip along the way. I recall, for instance, that she stipulated that her limousines had to be black. When a white one showed up at her hotel in St. Louis one day, she refused to get in and “appropriated” a rental car from the parking lot instead.

Driving like Steve McQueen in “Bullitt,” she tore through the streets to make the curtain. She was trailed by the white limo and a black one, hurriedly dispatched by the car company.

When I asked her about the car chase, Dunaway replied: “I think a white limousine is garish, don’t you?”

I’m not sure what Daly’s transportation demands will be on Broadway,

but I can’t see her racing around Times Square in a Zipcar, followed by a couple of stretches.

You can bet she’ll deliver a knockout performance, however. Peter Marks, the critic for the Washington Post, praised Daly’s Callas last spring at the Kennedy Center, calling her a “priceless put-down artist” who also captures the singer’s “vulnerability” in this “droll, tightly wound” star turn.

Daly’s a terrific actress, and who doesn’t want to see her back on Broadway in a fun old play like “Master Class”?

Still, MTC’s import strategy is a little worrying. This is a theater that’s given us world premieres of plays by A.R. Gurney (“Children”), Richard Greenberg (“Eastern Standard”) and John Patrick Shanley (“Doubt”), as well as a couple of other McNally classics (“The Lisbon Traviata,” “Lips Together, Teeth Apart”). I hope MTC isn’t getting gun-shy about new work, even though the downside — failure — is nasty. Lincoln Center is finding that out this year with its two disasters, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “A Free Man of Color.”

Meadow says that MTC will soon present a new play by David Lindsay-Abaire, “Good People,” which has strong insider buzz. And she notes that Lynn Nottage‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ruined,” which MTC co-produced with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, is being performed all over the world.

“We’re in the export business, the import business, the manufacturing business — I don’t want to tell you how many businesses we’re in,” she says, laughing. “What we’re really in is show business.”

michael.riedel@nypost.com