[The playwright Terrence McNally (1938 -2020) died
on Tuesday, 24 March, at 81.
[On Sunday, 9 June 2019,
McNally had been honored at the 73rd Annual Tony Awards with a Special Tony
Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.
The award citation reads:
Terrence McNally has had a remarkably far-ranging
career, including at least one new work on Broadway in each of the last six
decades. A revival of his play Frankie
and Johnny in the Clair de Lune begins performance on Broadway on May
4, starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon. In 2018 he was inducted into the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a
recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lucille
Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. He
has won four Tony Awards for his plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master
Class and his musical books for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime.
He has written a number of TV scripts,
including “Andre’s Mother,” for which he won an Emmy Award. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a
Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie
Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards from the Dramatists Guild. In 1996 he was inducted into the Theater Hall
of Fame. He wrote the libretto for the
operas Great Scott and Dead Man Walking, both with
music by Jake Heggie. Other plays
include Mothers and Sons; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; The Lisbon
Traviata; A Perfect Ganesh; The Visit; The Full Monty; Corpus Christi; Bad
Habits; Next; The Ritz; Anastasia; It’s Only a Play; Where Has Tommy Flowers
Gone?; and The Stendhal Syndrome.
[On 12 June, Chris Jones, a Chicago Tribune theater reviewer, published the following
article. I’m running it on Rick On Theater as
a belated tribute to the dramatist the New York Times called the “Tony-Winning
Playwright of Gay Life.” ~Rick]
“Lifetime achievement,” said the writer Terrence McNally at
the Tony Awards last weekend. “Not a moment too soon.”
That dry opening joke by the 80-year-old author of such
dramatic masterworks as “Master Class,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de
Lune” and the criminally underappreciated “Mothers and Sons,” not to mention
the books to the musicals “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and “The Full
Monty,” and the libretto to the opera “Dead Man Walking” and countless other
screenplays, teleplays and other works, was about the most awkward gag of the
night.
Why? Clearly the ever-impish and self-aware McNally was
acknowledging his own mortality. And in America, at this moment, nothing seems
to make an awards show crowd less comfortable. It’s hard to come out in your
fancy clothes and roar for youth and change, to take down the old guard, when
the old guard is not necessarily looking so good.
McNally had taken a while to walk out on stage, leaving the
award’s presenter, Karen Olivo, to nervously stare at her monitor. And he came
out with attached breathing apparatus, tubes dangling, as if with a certain
intentionality. In play after play, McNally wrote about gay Americans
confronting early deaths that could have been avoided, had people outside the
theater industry given more of a darn. His own appearance put that back in
mind. Broadway artists love to complain about the grip of the patriarchy. But
an inconvenient truth is that the patriarchy — if you mean straight, white,
WASP-ish men — never gave two shakes about the theater. This industry was never
banking, or even Hollywood.
Broadway always was the home of outsiders. In fact, Broadway
largely was the creation of outsiders, especially gay men. They were the ones
who composed most of the musicals, choreographed most of the dance numbers,
wrote a whole lot of the plays. They ran things, too. And they were most of the
critics. (They still are).
This remarkable community, often under duress, sometimes
working while dying, built a stable, billion-dollar industry for the rest of
America and, as the now-cliched Tonys speech about the kids watching at home
goes, in the process made a lot of people in the hinterlands feel less alone.
They taught us all how to love. And, yes, how to die. For,
as Tony Kushner once said to me, we only learn how to deal with grief and loss
by hearing the survival stories of others.
It’s fair enough to argue that much must now change for all
kinds of good reasons, that opportunities must be broadened, but the lack of
gratitude to these forefathers expressed by many young progressives is nothing
short of breathtaking. There is a chronic misunderstanding of history. The
Broadway establishment has always been composed of rebels and outcasts —
without whom, the misery of the era of AIDS would have been so very much worse.
These gay men saved lives.
But back to McNally, a lifesaver himself.
Many an outre fashion statement was photographed and
breathlessly described at the Tonys. But nothing shuts people up like a
breathing tube. No one wants to tweet about that. Almost no one did. Especially
since McNally appeared in stark contrast to an image of the writer that had
shown up a few weeks earlier in a glossy New York Times Style Magazine shoot,
which had made him look 20 years younger.
Now you might well have watched the Tony Awards on Sunday
night (assuming you weren’t part of the 14 percent of viewers of last year’s
ceremony who had dropped away) without seeing what I am describing. McNally’s
award, and thus his speech, did not appear in the broadcast portion of the
evening, which tells you right there how much we value lifetime achievement
these days.
Of course, lifetime achievement awards are complicated for
artists. Upon receiving one, David Mamet once said to me: "The idea of
life achievement only means one thing to the artist. ‘Don’t you think that’s
just about enough?’ The healthy artist would respond, ‘I’ll be the judge of
that. At some point, I’ll leave. But you’ll have to kill me.’"
Mamet was exactly right.
But I found what McNally had to say (I was watching it live)
to be far and away the most powerful part of the evening. He did not quip like
Mamet; clearly, McNally had decided this was the moment to define his life.
The speech was little more than three minutes. Yet this was
the most beautiful recounting of one of this nation’s most distinguished
artistic careers.
“Theater changes hearts,” he said, struggling to fully
breathe his way through his words. “That secret place where we all truly live.”
McNally found time to speak of early failure and how John
Steinbeck told him to get back on his horse: “If you ain’t been throwed, you
ain’t rode.” He recalled how much the artists of a previous generation had
meant to him as a small boy. He revealed that his father, after watching “Death
of a Salesman” and seeing a traumatic vision of what happens to so many of us
later in an American life in an American business, had quit his job and struck
out on his own.
He talked about his pride in “softening the hearts” of
unforgiving parents, which is about as noble a quest for an artist of any one
could imagine. He told young artists that he was part of a writing club with
open admission: “The only dues are your mind, your soul and your guts. All of
you.”
“The world needs artists more than ever,” McNally said, “to
remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are.”
And he finished with a quote from the last act of “The
Tempest,” Shakespeare’s late, great world of personal legacy: “O brave new
world that has such people in it.”
I thought at first McNally was talking about the theater in
the self-congratulatory way theater people often do.
But no. He had a broader purview.
“Shakespeare was talking to all of us,” McNally said. “No
one does it alone.”
Right. Whatever you do.
What an achievement. What a life.
[Terrence
McNally was born on 3 November 1938 in St. Petersburg, Florida, but raised in
Corpus Christi, Texas (the setting—and one level of the title-reference—for his
controversial 1998 play, Corpus Christi). He moved to New York City in 1956 to go to
Columbia University (class of 1960, Phi Beta Kappa).
[He
went to Mexico after graduating to work on his writing, returning to New York
when a play he’d submitted to the Actors Studio was rejected for production but
attracted the Studio’s attention to his potential.
[Openly
gay, he began a personal and professional association with Edward Albee and
later actor Robert Drivas.
(McNally married Thomas Kirdahy, a public-interest lawyer, in 2010,
following a seven-year civil union.)
[What would have been the writer’s first major
project was the book for the 1968 musical Here's Where I Belong (based on John Steinbeck’s
novel East of Eden), but McNally had his name removed from the
credits. (The show closed after a single
performance.) He gained critical
attention for his Off-Broadway plays like Next (1969) and The Ritz
(1975), and became recognized as a presence on the American stage with 1987’s Frankie
and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Off-Broadway (and the successful 1991 film
adaptation starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer). In 2002, the play was revived on Broadway for
243 performances.
[McNally’s gone on to win acclaim for both the
books of musicals (The Rink, 1984; Kiss
of the Spider Woman, 1993; Ragtime, 1998 ) and non-musical scripts (The Lisbon Traviata, 1989; Lips
Together, Teeth Apart, 1991; Love! Valour! Compassion!, 1995),
winning four Tonys (in addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award) and three
Drama Desks, among many other kudos; McNally even won a 1990 Emmy for Andre’s Mother, an AIDS-related tale broadcast
on the PBS series American Playhouse.
[Then in 1998, the
playwright stirred up a storm of protests and counter-protests with Corpus Christi, his
contemporary retelling of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in which Jesus and
his disciples are all depicted as gay.
[The Catholic Church
condemned the play, death threats were sent to McNally (who even received a fatwa from a British
imam) and the Manhattan Theatre Club, the company producing the première, and
anyone connected to the production.
[Right-wing pundits and
commentators wrote against the play—without ever having seen or even read it—and
leftists defended it on principal, also before any public performance or the
publication of the text. (I have written
about this incident in “The First Amendment & The Arts” on ROT; see 8 May 2010.)
[The
theater postponed the presentation, but First Amendment advocates and theater
artists across the country objected to the cave-in and the play was
rescheduled. Subsequent productions of Corpus Christi attracted
similar controversy, including legal action to prevent public money from being
spent on them at institutions that receive federal or state subsidies. (Some suits were defeated by the productions’
backers and others succeeded.)
[McNally won, in
addition to the Tonys, the Obies, and the Emmy, many other awards, including
Lucille Lortels and Drama Desks. He was
also nominated for a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for A Perfect Ganesh.
His last Broadway project was the revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune last June
and July. He also wrote the book for the
musical Anastasia, which ran for 808 regular performances and 38
previews in 2017-19. Off-Broadway,
McNally last wrote Fire and Air in 2018, premièred at the Classic Stage Company.
[McNally survived lung cancer in the late 1990s
and suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from that
time on. He died at Sarasota Memorial
Hospital in Florida on 24 March from complications of the coronavirus.
[I saw six McNally plays or musicals and appeared in
one of his one-acts as a grad student.
The only two, however, for which I have reports, both on ROT, are The Stendhal Syndrome (2004),
posted on 15 June 2019, and And Away We Go (2013), 5 December 2013.]
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