A TRIBUTE TO A PLAYWRIGHT WHOSE VOICE WE WERE BLESSED TO HEAR
PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN Terrence McNally (1938-2020) at his home in Manhattan weeks before his death.
TERRENCE McNALLY WAS BORN and died in Florida. Which is something of a cosmic geographical joke, because the man was always a New Yorker.
So were his parents, but they had run away to the Sunshine State to operate a seaside bar and grill Their son arrived, in St. Petersburg, on Nov. 3, 1938. When the family restaurant went up in flames, literally, they moved back to New York — to Long Island — for a while. And although the McNallys soon headed for Texas (Dallas, then Corpus Christi, where Terrence graduated from high school), the boy always knew.
As a child, he’d seen his first Broadway shows, including “Annie, Get Your Gun,” when Ethel Merman was in the title role, and “The King and I,” with Gertrude Lawrence. When it was time for college, he headed straight back to the city, majoring in English at Columbia University (class of 1960).
ONE OF HIS FIRST jobs was as a tutor to the sons of John Steinbeck, the everything-winning author. The family was planning a round-the-world cruise, and poor Terrence had to go along.
His first famous boyfriend was Edward Albee. They shared a taxi after a party and — the way Albee remembered it — the next thing either of them knew, they were living together. (The older man, by 10 years, was busy writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the time.)
From the beginning, Albee and McNally disagreed about the advisability of “outness.” “I always felt it was O.K. to be gay in the American theater,” McNally said in a T magazine interview last year. “And I never understood my friends who stayed closeted.” (Photo: McNally in 1974.)
But McNally didn’t start writing about gay characters and issues right away. “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” (1987) was about a middle-aged man and woman having a one-night stand with unexpected possibilities. (Photo: Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco on Broadway in 2002.)
Granted, “The Ritz” (1975) was set in a bathhouse populated by lusty, well-toned gay men in towels, but the homosexuality was played for laughs. A heterosexual Mafioso ends up hiding there by mistake, and oh my heavens, what strange things are going on here?
The Broadway run of “The Ritz” must have been intriguing backstage in many ways. It was directed by Robert Drivas, who succeeded McNally as Albee’s lover. But that’s another (multivolume) story.
“Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” which began Off Broadway in 1991, was about a gay men who had died of AIDS, but there were no gay characters in it.
The play was even set in the Pines, the relentlessly fashionable, upscale and gay Fire Island town. But the four characters were all straight people — staying at the home of one person’s recently deceased gay relative — and afraid to use the pool.
For me, though, “Love! Valour! Compassion!” was the McNally play that put it all together.
It did for a lot of people, I guess. When called on to sum up the man’s career, many people just list his five Tony Awards: best play for “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” best play for “Master Class” (a female opera star reflecting), best book for the musical “The Full Monty” (naked straight men dancing), best book for the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (a transsexual Argentine prisoner vamping). and lifetime achievement (2019) .
Of course that summary doesn’t even touch on “Corpus Christi,” “Ragtime,” “The Visit,” “Lisbon Traviata,” “It’s Only a Play” or “The Rink.” (Photo: Chita Rivera with McNally.)
Or McNally’s Emmy Award for “Andre’s Mother” (1990), about a gay man’s AIDS death, which he later reworked for the stage as “Mothers and Sons.” Or his work in real-live opera.
But to me, “Love! Valour! Compassion!” was profoundly familiar and eternally haunting. Three holiday weekends with a country house full of adorable, smart, clever and professionally creative gay men? Yes, please.
BETRAY! REPENT! REPEAT! The 1995 Broadway cast of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” Standing, from left: John Glover, Randy Becker, Justin Kirk, Anthony Heald and John Benjamin Hickey. Seated: Nathan Lane. Kneeling: Stephen Bogardus.
THE FIRST TIME I saw the show was at City Center in 1994, Nobody described that production better in one sentence than David Richards, who was then chief theater critic of The New York Times (briefly, between Frank Rich and Ben Brantley). Richards summed up the essence of the show:
“The love, the gallantry, the courage, the outrageous repartee and the abiding melancholy it wants to dispel.”
I don’t remember every plot point, but there were eight men and seven actors (John Glover played twins), and for some reason I was most taken with Arthur and Perry, who had been a couple for 14 years (“We’re role models,” one says begrudgingly) while all those around them hopped in and out of tricks and flings and relationships. (Actually, I don’t think you can hop in and out of a trick. But we’re short of editors during the plague.) At the end, there’s a sort of coda, which includes descriptions of their deaths, many years later.
I saw the Off Broadway “Love! Valour! Compassion!” with my friends SW and KL, who had been together for a decade or so at the time. And I thought of them. And when KL told me, on our first day at the 2002 Sondheim festival at Kennedy Center, that he and SW were going their separate ways after what was at that time 20+ years, the first thing I thought about was that scene in McNally’s play.
WHEN I WROTE ABOUT the 1995 Broadway production for my old employer, The New York Times, it was a feature article on Randy Becker, who played Ramon, the outsider, and had a memorable scene lying in the sun on a raft in the middle of a lake.
I can’t really classify it as hate mail, but I did receive a very snarky letter from a reader, complaining that I had not mentioned Becker’s penis and suggesting that the article had been coy because it neglected to comment on the breadth and depth and height of the actor’s genitalia. (Which has nothing to do with this photo of McNally with Tyne Daly, left, and Patti Lupone, two of his leading ladies.)
All I know for sure is that “Love! Valour! Compassion!” felt like a dream, both times I saw it. And so did the people in it. Maybe they were.
YOUNG TERRENCE. We’re not sure whose idea this early photo session was, but this sort of thing never seemed to hurt Truman Capote.
McNALLY WAS 81 WHEN he died at a hospital in Sarasota — which, friends tell me, already had a special floor for coronavirus patients. He was particularly vulnerable to the virus, having survived lung cancer two decades ago and battling COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) in recent days.
He was married to Tom Kirdahy — since 2003 by civil union, since 2010 by legal marriage in New York State. (In photo: McNally with Kirdahy at the 2019 Tony Awards ceremony.)
In the T article, the writer, Philip Galanes, named what he believed to be the distinguishing characteristic of McNally’s work: “his canny mix of terror and humor.”
I wonder why that seems so relevant now.
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CHECK OUT BROADWAY.COM FOR INFORMATION ON THE ALL-STAR ONLINE PRESENTATION OF “LIPS TOGETHER, TEETH APART” SCHEDULED FOR APRIL 6. 2020. THE CAST: JESSE TYLER FERGUSON, CELIA KEENAN-BOLGER, ZACHARY QUINTO AND ARI GRAYNOR.
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