Playwright McNally dies
“The quintessential man of the theater” dies of complications from COVID-19.
Terrence McNally, whose long, varied and prolific career as a playwright, musical librettist and screenwriter earned him five Tony Awards and an Emmy, died Tuesday. He was 81.
McNally, once referred to as “the quintessential man of the theater” by actress Zoe Caldwell, died of complications related to the coronavirus, his publicist Matt Polk said. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001 and twice underwent surgery.
While most playwrights since World War II have arrived like comets, the arc of McNally’s writing life testified to the riches — especially insight, empathy and a hesitance to judge flawed people too harshly — that came with maturity.
“A huge part of me is gone. But then it’s not. Terrence wouldn’t like that,” tweeted Broadway legend Chita Rivera, who worked with McNally on numerous projects, including “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” “He helped to make me who I am as a person. He is the epitome of love and friendship. Only God knows how much I will miss him.”
“Hamilton” creator LinManuel Miranda shared his own tribute on social media: “Heartbroken over the loss of Terrence McNally, a giant in our world, who straddled plays and musicals deftly. Grateful for his staggering body of work and his unfailing kindness.”
McNally earned his first Broadway writing credit at age 23 and continued steadily from there into his 30s, establishing a reputation as an edgy and talented playwright and farceur who consistently challenged and mocked authority during the Vietnam War era. But McNally’s streak of signature plays — the ones that brought him to the front rank of American playwriting — didn’t begin until 1987, the year he turned 48.
“Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” (1987), “The Lisbon Traviata” (1989), “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” (1991) “A Perfect Ganesh” (1993), “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1994) and “Master Class” (1995) may not qualify as landmarks with acclaim among theater lovers — as has been the case with the some of McNally’s more famed contemporaries, such as Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and Sam Shepard.
But the plays he wrote during his extended creative high tide were funny, warm, poignant, life-affirming and popular.
In the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, McNally, who was gay and in 2000 lost longtime partner Gary Bonasorte to the disease, met the demands of that critical time with a warmer, more embracing vision than he’d shown in his first quarter-century of work.
He won best-play Tonys in 1995 and 1996. The first was for “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” in which eight gay men spending holiday weekends together one summer under the shadow of AIDS have their bonds tested and affirmed. He won again with “Master Class,” a loving but hardly fawning portrayal of opera diva Maria Callas.
“When I’m writing, I try not to think in terms of themes,” McNally told the New York Times in 2004. “But I think I write about the difficulty of people connecting as they’re trying to find hope, trying to find their way to real love and commitment.”
McNally disliked being described as a gay playwright, dismissing it as a reductive label. Still, it was a subject he took on from early in his career.
“I think I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a gay man at this particular moment in our history,” he wrote in a preface to the published text of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” “I think I wanted to tell my friends how much they’ve meant to me. I think I wanted to tell everyone else who we are when they aren’t around,” he added.
Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, McNally fell first for opera. After winning notice as a playwright, he became a regular panelist on a quiz show that aired during weekly radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. McNally’s lifelong love of music positioned him to write Tony-winning books for two musicals far outside the feel-good, romantic Broadway norm.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) adapted Manuel Puig’s novel and stage drama about the unlikely bond between two Latin American cellmates: an apolitical, movie-bedazzled gay man and a heterosexual political prisoner who is a committed revolutionary.
With “Ragtime” (1998), McNally grappled successfully with E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel about early 20th century America — a task that required interweaving three story strands involving a patrician WASP family, a penniless Jewish immigrant who becomes a pioneering filmmaker and Coalhouse Walker Jr., a proud young black pianist driven to violence by racial injustice.
His fifth Tony would be a lifetime achievement award given in 2019.
McNally won his Emmy for “Andre’s Mother,” a 1990 teleplay he wrote for PBS’ “American Playhouse” series; it expanded upon his short piece about a mother who couldn’t accept her son’s homosexuality during life and had to come to terms with it after his death.
At the same time, the playwright was capable of lighter entertainments. He wrote both the stage play and film script for “The Ritz” (1975), a farce about a heterosexual man who hides out in a gay bathhouse when he runs afoul of his Mafioso brother-in-law. His book for the stage musical version of “The Full Monty” (2000) changed the film’s British backdrop to Buffalo, N.Y., as it told the story about downon-their-luck working-class men who become strippers to cobble together a living and regain their sense of accomplishment.
“If “Ragtime” hoped to say something worthwhile as it wanted to be liked, ‘The Full Monty’ only wanted to be liked and dare not say anything much at all,” writer Thomas S. Hischak complained in his book “Boy Loses Girl: Broadway’s Librettists.”
While he also wrote the screenplay for a film version of “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” McNally always set his theatrical work first, and said the main reason he lived in New York City was to be able to see three or four plays a week and keep tabs on which actors might be right for his shows.
Caldwell, who died last month and for whom McNally tailored the part of the imperious Maria Callas of “Master Class,” was among the theater folk who appreciated his priorities: “Nowadays playwrights are snapped up by Hollywood ... and you never hear from them again” in the theater world, she told the Los Angeles Times in 1995 as “Master Class” was about to open at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. “Terrence has never quit being a man of the theater. And now age and experience have given his work an added compassion and depth.”
McNally’s father, Hubert, had a beer distributorship in Corpus Christi, and his mother, Dorothy, kept the books.
McNally began to write plays as a teenager; he attended Columbia University and indulged his theatrical cravings in New York.
While still in college, McNally began a romantic relationship with Albee and spent two years as a stage manager and gofer for the Actors Studio.
In 1963, McNally notched his first Broadway credit, as co-adaptor of “The Lady of the Camellias,” based on a mid-19th century novel and play by Alexandre Dumas, the younger. Meanwhile, his first original full-length play, “And Things That Go Bump in the Night,” landed on
Broadway in 1965.
McNally found a simpatico lead actor in James Coco, and began to enjoy success on and off-Broadway with plays such as “Next.”
McNally’s career threatened to fall apart when his next satire, a show-biz lampoon called “Broadway, Broadway,” died during its tryout run in Philadelphia. McNally stopped writing after the disaster, and began to drink.
“I sulked. I lost my nerve,” he told The Times in 1992. “If you’re scared you can’t do anything. And I guess I got scared.”
At the suggestion of John Tillinger, who became his regular play director, McNally reworked “Broadway, Broadway” into “It’s Only a Play,” featuring Coco and Christine Baranski. New York Times critic Frank Rich raved that “only a writer who loves the theater and has survived its bloodiest wars could have written a comedy like this.”
McNally had found solid home turf on which to fight the theatrical wars. Starting with “It’s Only A Play” (1986), McNally enjoyed a 13year run in which the Manhattan Theatre Club, a nonprofit, off-Broadway regional house, produced everything he wrote except for musicals and “Master Class,” which premiered at the Philadelphia Theatre Company.
He also continued to work as a librettist, crafting the book to “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2005, then moved to Broadway, earning mixed reviews. More recently, he wrote the book for “Anastasia,” which premiered in 2016 and then ran on Broadway from 2017 to 2019.
For McNally, actors were everything. He regarded them as creative forces whom he likened to builders who bring into being a structure that had existed in abstract form.
“My definition of a good actor is someone who uses the text to ... make alive and whole what had only existed on paper and in my mind as a blueprint,” McNally wrote in his 1994 preface to “15 Short Plays.” “They give it color and movement and life.”
As for his own role, McNally said, “I like to write plays .... I like rehearsing plays. I never feel more alive than when I’m in a rehearsal room with ... actors and a good director and everyone is waiting for me to come up with a rewrite.”
McNally’s survivors include his husband, Tom Kirdahy.