Of the several outstanding contemporary male dramatists whose work has charted the homosexual experience in a society blighted by prejudice, and then by Aids, Terrence McNally, who has died aged 81, from complications to an underlying pulmonary condition due to coronavirus, was the most prolific and multifaceted.
In a theatrical career spanning five decades – his place was on the stage, not in films or on television – he produced three dozen plays, books for 10 musicals and libretti for a quartet of operas, and won four Tony awards. He may not have enjoyed the defining zinger of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, but his work brought joy to Broadway and touched all but the stoniest of hearts.
Two of his musical libretti best illustrated his skill and flair for editing and adaptation: Kiss of the Spider Woman, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, which played at the Shaftesbury in London in 1992, transformed Manuel Puig’s novel about two cellmates in a Latin American jail into a pulsating face-off between a gay window dresser and a straight Marxist firebrand. Their devastating emotional odyssey is supervised by Chita Rivera’s dream-spinning Aurora, a screen idol and symbol of death. A brilliant production by Hal Prince did not do any harm, either.
He managed to convey the historical sweep of EL Doctorow’s “birth of a nation” novel Ragtime in a 1998 version (music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens), with sharp scenic vignettes, pop-up vaudeville items and a real sense of the American cultural melting pot. I preferred the musical to Miloš Forman’s 1981 film, not least because of one of the truly great opening numbers in which three factions – white society, black workers, Jewish immigrants – gather like storm clouds to the gloriously syncopated ragtime beat. McNally had been alive to the visceral power and transformative ecstasy of theatre since the age of eight, when his paternal grandfather took him to see Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway.
He was born in St Petersburg, Florida, where his parents, Dorothy (nee Rapp) and Hubert McNally, ran a bar and grill on the beach. The family moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he attended the high school – an experience channelled through his provocative play Corpus Christi (1987), in which Jesus and the apostles are depicted as gay Texans – and then enrolled at Columbia University in New York.
Already embarked on a five-year relationship with Albee, he took his degree in English in 1960. His first stage work included a contribution to a Broadway staging of The Lady of the Camellias in 1963, a full-length debut with And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965) – a flop that gained McNally a certain notoriety with its monstrous family portrait and explicit gay seduction scene – a few one-act plays and, at last, a hit: The Ritz (1975), for which Rita Moreno won a Tony award for her performance as an over-the-top bathhouse singer, Googie Gomez, a sort of Latin American Bette Midler.
McNally pointed to his Irish Catholic antecedents when discussing his heavy drinking during these years, though he finally quit alcohol completely in the mid-1980s. “I never thought I wrote literature,” he said at the time. “I write plays for actors and I need actors I can trust.” These included such elite names as Rivera, Nathan Lane, Tyne Daly, Zoe Caldwell, Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.
These last two starred in last year’s Broadway revival of a 1987 two-hander, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, a barbed and feisty shake-down after a night in the sack for a waitress and a short-order cook in Hell’s Kitchen (played superbly in London in 1989 by Julie Walters and Brian Cox). The show was a dramatic appendage, in a way, to The Rink (1984), McNally’s first collaboration with Kander and Ebb, an embattled stand-off between a mother and daughter (Rivera and Liza Minnelli) in the nostalgic glow of a closing roller rink.
The best song in The Rink was the stomping duet The Apple Doesn’t Fall Very Far from the Tree, which summed up the show’s theme, really. And it also indicated, said the New York Times, how McNally was moving from his default mode of the comedy of insult “to a mature compassionate playwright increasingly aware of the ache in the human heart and the terrifying voids between people”.
Such was the general reaction to Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), a spikily entertaining play directed by Joe Mantello which anatomised issues of love and happiness among eight gay men over three acts, set on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day.
Not that bitchy waspishness was absent from that piece any more than it was from two tribute plays to McNally’s favourite operatic diva, Maria Callas, whom he loved for her unconventional voice and apparent dramatic spontaneity: The Lisbon Traviata (1985) in which two Callas devotees squabble over the singers and arias in their lives and loves; and Master Class (1996), starring Patti LuPone in the West End, a teaching session which Callas inevitably turns into a raucous exercise in self-justification.
McNally found a new home from home in the Manhattan Theatre Club, New York’s new plays factory. As each of his plays opened there, the artistic director Lynne Meadow would commit unequivocally to presenting the next one. This gave the writer the confidence to carry on, even when his critical reputation, never totally secure, wavered.
Two plays from this period stand out: Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), an Aids play set on Fire Island with two (straight) married couples, and A Perfect Ganesh (1993) in which two Connecticut dowagers – played in the British premiere in Leeds by Prunella Scales and Eleanor Bron – find connections in their passage to darkest and deepest India.
But McNally was not finished with musicals. The Full Monty (2001) was cunningly and inventively transposed from the film’s Sheffield setting to the world of unemployed steelworkers in Buffalo, New York, with a great blue-collar grassroots score by David Yazbek. For Anastasia (2017), McNally reunited with his Ragtime collaborators Flaherty and Ahrens on a retelling of the film about the lost Grand Duchess. For once, I felt McNally had hit upon material to which he was unsuited.
His last and extended adventure was a version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit with Kander and Ebb, his last great effort for Rivera, born to play any musical version of the richest woman in the world, though the first casting idea was Angela Lansbury. But the project stuttered after several try-outs starting in Chicago in 2001 and ending, after just two months on Broadway, in 2015. There was a happier culmination in 2019, when McNally was awarded a fifth Tony for his lifetime achievement.
McNally’s long-term partner Gary Bonasorte died of Aids in 2000. He is survived by Tom Kirdahy, a producer, with whom he entered into a civil partnership in Vermont in 2003 and whom he married in Washington in 2010, and by his brother, Peter.
• Michael Terrence McNally, playwright, born 3 November 1938; died 24 March 2020
