GLR May-June 2024

produced by MTC with a phalanx of protestors outside the the ater every night of the run. In 2017, McNally published Selected Works: A Memoir in Plays , an anthology of eight plays with essays by the author that provided context for each play’s original production and what inspired him to write it. In all, he wrote 26 full-length plays, over half a dozen one-acts, four teleplays, three films, and four operas. Also a gifted librettist, McNally wrote the books for ten Broadway musicals, including Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime . His only work-for-hire experience was the book for TheRink (1984), after which he decided to work only on musi cals as an original collaborator. McNally held no romantic notions about the workaday as pects of his career. “You learn there’s nothing precious about writing, it’s a job like any other.” And as for the art of play writing, “[It’s] a craft, and if it’s good, it’s an art, but it’s not some mystical thing. Writing plays is very practical. Theatre is the most practical art form I can think of.” This speaks to Mc Nally’s work ethic, but leaves out his passion: “Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself

heard. It’s for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn’t worth dying for, maybe it isn’t worth writing.” As a reward for writing from his heart, McNally had shelves and walls full of prizes—five Tony Awards among them—and accolades, including his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Yet the recognition he was most proud of was when Matthew Lopez told the press that his hugely suc cessful play The Inheritance could not have been written with out “the influence of Terrence McNally’s lifetime’s work.” Sharing the story with Frontain, McNally declared: “It’s the greatest honor I’ve ever been paid.” The best advice McNally ever received? “I learned from Elaine May that playwriting is about what characters are doing, not what they’re saying.” For a man who made significant con tributions to modern theater, Terrence McNally’s impact has not yet been fully appraised. One thing that these interviews make clear is that within the pantheon of American playwrights, Mc Nally was a modest person and a serious artist who remained unpretentious to the end.

When Doom Was All the Rage

G YORGY KERTESZ, the central character in this ambitious his torical novel, The Future Was Color , fears the world will end before his life does. And with good reason: Gyorgy is Jewish. In 1944, at sixteen, he is sent by his parents from Budapest to New York City to escape the Holocaust, in which his parents will perish. Gyorgy is

Hiroshima followed by a science fiction film about space aliens invading the earth, Gy orgy has an epiphany. He realizes that such films, if good enough, can do what great art does: “shake and alter” people. Gyorgy de cides his mission will be to warn Americans of their impending atomic doom. The Future Was Color opens in 1956, the year of the failed Hungarian uprising.

D ANIEL A. B URR

THE FUTURE WAS COLOR ANovel by Patrick Nathan Counterpoint. 210 pages, $26.

also gay. He falls in love with a troubled gay man who, believ ing he and Gyorgy can have no future together, introduces Gy orgy to anonymous sex in public toilets. When Gyorgy is entrapped and arrested, he flees New York and changes his name to avoid deportation. Patrick Nathan is the author of SomeHell , a 2019 Lambda Award finalist for gay fiction, Image Control , a nonfiction book on visual media and the rise of fascism, and many essays. Not surprisingly, his latest book is a novel of ideas—possibly too many ideas. When Gyorgy starts to explore his new country, he falls in with a group of painters and intellectuals who talk ab stractly about their work. They tell him what books to read, what concerts to attend, what art openings to drop in on. As Nathan shows off his knowledge of the cultural milieu of post war New York—Jackson Pollock makes an appearance in the novel—his characters are sometimes in danger of becoming mere mouthpieces for ideas about art and politics. But Gyorgy’s struggle to become more than an “invisible immigrant” keeps the narrative focused. Despite his many mentors, Gyorgy knows he must discover for himself what to do with his life. He finds the answer one day in a movie theater. Watching newsreel footage of the bombing of Daniel A. Burr, a frequent G&LR contributor, lives in Covington, KY. May–June 2024

George Curtis, as Gyorgy is now known, is in Los Angeles writ ing screenplays for science fiction movies. One of his screen plays, about giant spiders that shoot flames from their eyes, is a box office success, terrifying audiences with scenes of apoca lyptic destruction. Although he has tried to remain inconspicu ous, suddenly George is popular . Living in the Hollywood of McCarthy-era witch hunts, he never reveals anything about his background except to say that he’s from Europe. He finds it more difficult to suppress his sexual urges. The novel contains many erotically charged scenes. The key to their effectiveness is their restraint. Early in the novel, George and a fellow screenwriter, Jack, are working late at night in their studio office. Sweating at his typewriter, Jack, all-American handsome and presumably straight, unbuttons his shirt to the waist. George imagined that this would happen; it’s the reason he stayed late. While George steals furtive glances, Jack opens his shirt and eventually removes it. “Jack’s feet were propped on his desk, his free hand resting gently in his lap even if one fin ger waved calmly, like something alive at the bottom of the sea, as it brushed something sizably hidden.” Unexpected compar isons, such as the one in this sentence, are a distinctive feature of Nathan’s writing. As he did in New York, George falls under the sway of per sonalities stronger than his own. Jack seduces him. Madeline, a

35