How enraging that one of the first prominent American artists to be taken by the coronavirus pandemic was the playwright Terrence McNally, who died on Tuesday, at the age of eighty-one. McNally, who wrote with heart, wit, and gusto about gay life during the AIDS crisis. McNally, who lost two life partners to AIDS—the actor Robert Drivas and the writer and AIDS-research advocate Gary Bonasorte—before finding another, the theatre producer Tom Kirdahy. (Kirdahy and McNally married in 2010, in Washington, D.C. Once same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, in 2015, they renewed their vows in New York, with Kirdahy’s college roommate, Bill de Blasio, officiating.) McNally, who survived lung cancer and kept on writing plays through his eighth decade. It feels petty, an ending that should have been rewritten out of town.
No, COVID-19 isn’t AIDS, and it isn’t cancer. And McNally’s bouncy œuvre, which spanned half a century, can’t be reduced to AIDS, or even to gayness. Perhaps his most elegant work, “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” is about a one-night stand between a heterosexual couple, a waitress and a short-order cook. McNally was an accomplished librettist for musicals such as “The Rink,” “Ragtime,” and “The Full Monty.” He thought that being called a “gay writer” was as absurd as Arthur Miller being called a “straight writer.” But the subject that drew him to the page again and again was his milieu of cosmopolitan gay men—men who loved and betrayed one another, who deployed zingers like fizzy little bombs, who worshipped the theatre and could drop Ethel Merman references with panache. The slice of gay history that McNally chronicled stretched from the sex-fogged nineteen-seventies (in his breakout farce, “The Ritz,” about a straight garbage collector who hides from a Mafia boss in a gay bathhouse) through the plague years (“Andre’s Mother,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!”) and into the baffling new world of gay marriage and assimilation (“Some Men,” “Mothers and Sons”). He worked these head-spinning changes into splashy entertainments, bejewelled with one-liners and undergirded by warm humanity. He was a creature of show business, enamored with the gilded lunacy of the theatre. “I love being a playwright,” he said last year, when he received a lifetime-achievement Tony. “The hours are flexible, and you don’t have to wear a tie—unless you’re invited to the Tonys.”
McNally wasn’t as angry as Larry Kramer, as cerebral as Tony Kushner, as outrageous as Harvey Fierstein, or as acidic as Edward Albee, whom he dated while Albee was writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” His unpretentious comedies dabbled in the silly and the sentimental, and these plays pushed the envelope despite themselves. Brendan Gill, reviewing “The Ritz” in 1975, in The New Yorker, called McNally “a fearless taker of chances,” conceding, “There may have been a few threads of plot in need of disentangling at the final curtain, but I was having too good a time to notice them.” By then, McNally had fled his restrictive, working-class upbringing in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he was raised by parents who drank too much and didn’t understand their opera-mad son. (His mother, Dorothy, was a recurring inspiration in his plays, even seeing herself in the Maria Callas of “Master Class.”) McNally drank too much, too, until he spilled a drink on Lauren Bacall at a birthday party for Stephen Sondheim, and Angela Lansbury pleaded with him not to destroy himself or his talents. Fortunately, he listened to her.
In the eighties, the sweaty gay liberation of “The Ritz” turned lethal. “I’m always startled when I’m asked why I chose to write about AIDS,” McNally said, at the 2014 AIDS Walk. “There was no choice. An artist responds to their world and tries to make sense of it, even the bad things. What else was I going to write about, the weather?” A short play called “Andre’s Mother,” about a homophobic matron forced to grieve alongside her dead son’s lover, became a taboo-flouting television movie in 1990, of which the Times wrote, “It is a subject on which prime-time commercial television, most notably all those made-for-TV movies, has been virtually, and shamefully, silent.” McNally revived the title character—a stand-in for Dorothy—in the 2014 drama “Mothers and Sons,” set in a New York in which AIDS is no longer a death sentence and a new generation is blithely removed from its horrors. “First it will be a chapter in a history book, then a paragraph, then a footnote,” one character laments, adding, “I can feel it happening. All the raw edges of pain dulled, deadened, drained away.”
McNally’s plays—the hits and the misses—chart the evolution both of a deep-feeling soul and of the times. “Corpus Christi,” which recast Jesus and his disciples as gay men, became a lightning rod in the culture wars of the nineties, drawing protests (and death threats) from the scandalized Christian right. Manhattan Theatre Club was so concerned about security that it cancelled the production; when the company was accused of censorship, it added “Corpus Christi” back to its lineup, and the play opened in October, 1998—the same month that Matthew Shepard was murdered, in Wyoming. In “Some Men,” from 2007, McNally looked back on the seismic changes he’d witnessed, hopscotching through a Stonewall-era piano bar, the waiting room of an AIDS ward, the seventies-bathhouse scene of “The Ritz,” and a modern gay wedding, where one guest cracks, “Some people think this marriage thing is going to be the end of gay life as it has been practiced on this planet for a hundred million years.”
Actors loved McNally, because his characters were often irrepressible performers. In 1995 and 1996, he won back-to-back Tony Awards for Best Play, for “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class,” which gave career-defining roles, respectively, to Nathan Lane and Zoe Caldwell. Lane, whose long collaboration with the writer began with “The Lisbon Traviata,” in 1989, was the perfect avatar for McNally’s flamboyant wit. (The actor once said, “I’d have no career if it wasn’t for Terrence McNally.”) In the tender, ribald “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” he played Buzz, an H.I.V.-positive show queen who can recite the opening and closing dates of obscure Broadway musicals from memory. Over a series of lake-house weekends with a gaggle of gay friends, Buzz, in his wound-up exuberance, increasingly fails to cover up his fear of dying, and of dying alone. In Act III, a friend remarks that musicals don’t always have happy endings, and Buzz launches into a remarkable rant:
When Lane performed it, he got howls of laughter on cue. It’s not until “the only thing that happens is nothing” that a hush comes, as the audience realizes that Buzz has crossfaded from shtick to desperation: How can the Broadway world that he believes in so deeply fail to save him from his loneliness and terror? Buzz is such a magnetic creation that it’s tempting to see him as a double for the playwright—brassy, gregarious, his heart and his drollery on his sleeve. But there was probably much of McNally, too, in John (played by John Glover), the unlovable pianist who snoops through his friends’ diaries. “I am that merry wanderer of the night,” John says, tiptoeing through the house. “Curiosity, a strange house, an unfaithful bedfellow drive me. . . . I am obsessed with who people really are. They don’t tell us, so I must know their secrets.”
Another decade, another plague. McNally deserved better. So do we all.
