The Gay & Lesbian Review

ESSAY

Truth and Reconciliation R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN

T ERRENCE MCNALLY has become the Ameri- can theater’s great poet of the urgency of inter- personal relationships. “We gotta connect. We just have to. Or we die,” Johnny warns in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune —a play that movingly defines “a blowjob [as] a sensual metaphor for mutual acceptance.” Roughly from 1985 through 1995—that is, at the height of the AIDS pandemic in America—McNally penned one extraordinary play after an- other in which he addressed the global trauma in terms of the human need for connection and the obstacles that we create for ourselves in connecting with another person: The Lisbon Travi- ata (1985), Frankie and Johnny (1987), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), and, of course, the crit- ically acclaimed and enormously popular Love! Valour! Com- passion! (1994). More recently, he has celebrated in Some Men (2007) the bonds that gay men create both intentionally and un- intentionally across decades and generations; the discovery in Deuce (2007) of a heroic partnership between two long-retired people who seem to have the greatest difficulty connecting are mothers and their gay sons. In And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), McNally’s first professionally produced play, the tyrannical Ruby mocks her son Sigfrid for bringing home a male sexual partner for that evening’s game of “Get the Guest” and for writing a poem about an eagle’s desire to break free of earthly bonds and soar. Similarly, in A Perfect Ganesh , Katharine Brynne is inconsolable after her son Walter is beaten to death on the street late one night by five African-American males trawl- ing a gay neighborhood for fags to bash. Yet while he was alive, she had resented deeply Walter’s orientation and had objected to his referring to the apartment that he shared with his male partner as a “home.” Traveling in India, she meets an HIV-pos- itive gay man who ruefully acknowledges having been similarly rejected by his own mother. In Corpus Christi (1998), Mary is indifferent to the trials of Joshua, her gay teenage son, and proves to be anything but the archetypal loving mother who holds her infant son on her knee or sorrowfully gathers to her bosom his adult corpse. Even Chloe in Lips Together , who gets along famously with the gay men with whom she performs in community theater, admits that she would never want one of her pre-pubescent sons to turn out women tennis players; and in Unusual Acts of Devotion (2008), the small, life-affirming acts that members of a lower West-side apartment building quietly perform for one another. Throughout his œuvre, the two classes of

gay. The one thing that all children want to hear, Chloe instructs her childless sister-in-law, is “that they’re loved. That they’re safe.” But in McNally’s world, this is the one message that a mother seems to find impossible to deliver to her gay son. In 1988, Andre’s Mother bore witness to a significant mo- ment in American social history as the country reeled with pain and confusion at the height of the AIDS pandemic. First pre- sented on stage at the Manhattan Theatre Club as an eight- minute vignette that was part of an evening of short plays titled Urban Blight , Andre’s Mother was expanded by McNally into a fifty-minute Emmy Award-winning teleplay that first aired in 1990 as part of PBS’s American Playhouse . It starred Richard Thomas as the all too eager-to-please Cal, and the magisterial Sada Thompson in the title role, on whose silent face played her character’s tumultuous interior drama as stoical confusion min- gled with angry resentment and dissolved into unspeakable grief. Although the play clearly faults Andre’s Mother (she has no other name in the original text) for having been so judgmental of Andre’s sexuality that she lost her chance to have a genuine re- ceived during the months following the initial broadcast in which women thanked him for voicing so eloquently the pain of moth- ers who had no idea how to talk with their sons about the lat- ter’s sexuality, or how to care for them in their final illness. The letter-writers often signed themselves simply “Peter’s Mother” or “Michael’s Mother.” McNally’s latest play, Mothers and Sons , is essentially a continuation of the 1988 AIDS drama only twenty years later. Cal Porter receives an unexpected visit from Katharine Gerard (Andre’s Mother now has a name), last seen at the memorial service that Andre’s friends were holding for him in Central Park. Then he’d struggled to break through Mrs. Gerard’s angry and disapproving silence, eventually leaving her alone to grieve. At the climax of Mothers and Sons —which enjoyed a trial run this summer at Bucks County Playhouse and begins previews on Broadway at the Golden Theatre as of February 23—Cal fi- nally loses his self-control in the face of Mrs. Gerard’s stony façade, telling her: “You should have held me that day in the park [when I embraced you as I said goodbye]. ... I wanted you to hold me back. Jesus Christ, woman, reach out to someone. Let someone in.” Exasperated by her seemingly inexhaustible fund of hauteur and bitterness, Cal accepts that they will never share common ground and finally begins ushering her out of his apartment by helping her into her coat. But, the stage directions record, “her arms stay at her side. Awkwardly, her coat over her lationship with him while he was alive, the teleplay resonated for female viewers whose sons were ill or had died of AIDS. The Mc- Nally Archive in the Harry Ransom Human- ities Research Center in Austin, Texas, preserves a file of letters that McNally re-

Mothers and Sons describes the sea-change in American gay life from 1993 to 2013.

Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas.

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