GLR May-June 2024

In Dialog with a Playwright

D URING HIS LIFETIME, Ter rence McNally saw seventeen of his plays and musicals pre miere on Broadway, and along the way he developed a tenacity and main tained a relevance that has eluded most American playwrights in their later years. Conversations with Terrence McNally , ed ited by Raymond-Jean Frontain, helps to illuminate a writer whose work has not al

I’m not saying that at all. I’m a gay man who is a playwright. It’s not just about my sexuality.” McNally never wavered in his insistence that his sexual orientation should not be used as a way to define him as a writer. This typecasting further perturbed Mc Nally when it came to assumptions about the political nature of his work. “The play Lips Together, Teeth Apart was reviewed as

T HOMAS K EITH

CONVERSATIONS WITH TERRENCE McNALLY Edited by Raymond Jean Frontain Univ. Press of Mississippi 208 pages, $25.

a politically incorrect gay play because I enforced every stereo type … that gay men have promiscuous sex because the guys are having sex in the bushes. Well, gay men have sex. One of the ways you are gay is having sex with another man.” Addressing the often presumed obligation to be the mouthpiece for a cause, McNally added: “I don’t write plays to do service to gays, but I certainly don’t think I’m doing them a disservice either. The atre is not about writing role models.” During the first fifteen years of his career, McNally was known primarily for writing political plays and some come dies—most memorably TheRitz (1975), a successful farce that

ways shown up on the literary radar of critics and tastemakers. Within these nineteen interviews from 1974 through 2018 (McNally died from Covid-19 at age 81 in March of 2020), there is naturally some repetition of his origin story and certain incidents that serve as landmarks in his development as an artist. Especially memorable is when his parents in Corpus Christi, Texas, decided to listen to Saturday afternoon football games in their car so that adolescent Terrence could hear the Metro politan Opera on their good radio, direct the operas on miniature cardboard stages, and turn the volume up as loud as he pleased. While the most famous gay playwrights of the 1960s—Ten

takes place in a gay bathhouse. He began to branch out in 1987 with Frankie and Johnny at the Claire de Lune (McNally’s most performed play), a two-hander about a straight man and woman that, according to McNally, “[e]xamines intimacy and what people who are over forty do about having a relationship. ... It’s about love among the ashes.” With respect to the diversity of his char acters, themes, and styles, McNally de clared: “I would like to have it said that there is no typical play by Terrence Mc Nally.” In these interviews, he reflects on that variety when he speaks about the pub lic reception of his plays, such as the polemical Vietnam drama Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone (1971); the story of two older women who find their spiritual selves during a trip to India in APerfect Ganesh (1993); the biting drama of a group of Long Island elites who refuse to

nessee Williams, William Inge, and Ed ward Albee—remained professionally in the closet, McNally never hid his homo sexuality. In McNally’s first Broadway play, And Things that Go Bump in the Night (1965), one of the main characters, Sigfrid, is a gay man whose sexuality is not a driving factor in the story, but who does go home with a man he meets in a park. Such normalizing of a queer charac ter was radical for a commercial Broad way production at that time. One outraged critic wrote: “It would have been better if Terrence McNally’s parents had smoth ered him in his cradle.” Sigfrid was but the first in the gallery of McNally’s openly gay characters, most of whom do not suf fer because of their sexual orientation but instead cope with life by searching for connection with others. Because of the persistent presence of his unapologetically gay characters, the

Terrence McNally in New York, 2013.

swim in a pool after a man who died of AIDS had used it in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991); his investigation of the creative process as embodied by Maria Callas, Master Class (1995); his hilarious and compassionate look at a group of gay men living through the AIDS epidemic in Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994); and his contentious recasting of Jesus and his disciples as a group of contemporary gay men in Corpus Christi (1998). The uproar from right-wing and evangelical organizations about the latter prompted his long-time collaborators at the Manhat tan Theatre Club to announce they had pulled the production. After an even louder outcry from the theater community, it was

ater critics have been inclined to refer to McNally as a “gay playwright” or to marginalize him as “the spokesperson for gay writers.” McNally rejected the moniker “gay playwright” in in terview after interview, insisting that he was a writer who hap pened to be a gay man. For McNally, the distinction was meaningful, though he never shirked from acknowledging his sexuality. In a 1997 interview, McNally split the difference: “I’m always accused of saying that I’m not a gay playwright. Thomas Keith contributed a chapter on Robert Burns and Frederick Douglass to The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (2024).

TheG & LR

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