In A Master Class
Terrence McNally Still Writing Important, Provocative Plays
By FRANK RIZZO
May 21, 2006
Hartford Courant
Terrence McNally is on the sidewalk outside the Plays and Players Theater in downtown Philadelphia, script in hand, quietly going over notes with director Philip Himberg on the playwright's new play, "Some Men."
The episodic work examines the evolution of same-sex marriage but also acts as a chronicle of gay life from the 1920s to the present. On this sunny spring day, McNally appears - at least outwardly - relaxed, gracious and far from apprehensive about what the critics may say about his play in a few days. But he has been through this many times and knows the process from page to stage.
At 66, the four-time Tony Award-winning writer has had a prolific 40-plus-year career with plays ("Master Class," "A Perfect Ganesh," "Lips Together, Teeth Apart"), musicals ("Ragtime," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Full Monty"), operas ("Dead Man Walking") and films (from his plays "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune").
"Frankie and Johnny," his two-character study of loneliness, love and the need to make human connections, is in previews and opens Friday at Hartford Stage in a production starring Portia and Robert Clohessy.
"Both `Frankie and Johnny' and `Some Men' are about people looking for relationships and commitments, people who are trying to achieve intimacy," says McNally, at a far-from-intimate busy bistro. "Emotional intimacy is often very difficult. I think that's something we all want. The need to be in a loving, nurturing relationship is a very universal one. But if that need gets corrupted or perverted, I think people end up very unhappy, psychotic, suicidal or murderous. If that need is denied, something terrible happens to the soul."
"Some Men" looks at intimacy for gay men.
"Gay men and women found that it was not possible to be in such a relationship - it was only to be hidden, furtive, shameful, and it came at a terrible cost. It must have been a terrible thing to live with."
McNally says he was an "out" gay playwright from his arrival in New York in the late '50s from Corpus Christi, Texas. The son of a beer distributor, young McNally started out studying journalism at Columbia University, graduating cum laude in 1960. But he became increasingly interested in the arts. In his sophomore year, he began a years-long relationship with Edward Albee, who was then working on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe." While in college, McNally also acted as a tutor to the sons of John Steinbeck as the family toured Europe.
McNally turned to writing for the theater, and his first major effort, "And Things That Go Bump in the Night," made it to Broadway, a major achievement, even though it flopped. Four years later, the playwright, then 28, bounced back with his first hit, "Next," a one-act comedy starring James Coco that was on a double bill with a play by Elaine May, who directed both works.
"I got a crash course in playwriting from Elaine May," says McNally. "I consider her my greatest teacher, and I owe her so much. I also learned what it meant to write for actors."
Over the next 40 years, he would write for some of the best in the business, including Nathan Lane, Marian Seldes, Zoe Caldwell, F. Murray Abraham, Robert Drivas, John Glover, Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli
His career had its ups and downs in the '70s, but starting in the late '80s with "Frankie and Johnny," McNally found his professional stride, deepening his artistic voice with works that go straight to the heart.
"I had just turned 40 when I started to write `Frankie and Johnny,' and I thought that maybe I wouldn't meet anyone again," says McNally. "I think people want to be in relationships, but it doesn't always make you a bad person if you are not. Sometimes you have to have the luck to meet the right person, and I think smart people with their own sense of worth do not rush into relationships.
"When I wrote `Frankie and Johnny,' I thought it would be a play of interest to people who were over 40 who were lonely, but I found that the play speaks to a lot of people. The trick is to write characters honestly. If you're really honest, the universal is there."
As in all his plays, McNally says he puts a little of himself into his characters, and in `Frankie and Johnny,' he was equally divided between the romantic, extroverted short-order cook and the closed-off waitress damaged from previous relationships. In "Love! Valour! Compassion!" he split himself among the eight friends coping together at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Even when a character turns murderous, as in "The Lisbon Traviata," McNally identifies.
"There's a part of me that has wanted to murder someone," he says.
Who?
He smiles. "I can't say."
Initials?
He laughs. "I am a writer, and I have an outlet that's called theater. And then I get to have artists like Zoe Caldwell in `Master Class' saying my deepest thoughts."
McNally says that is his most autobiographical work.
"It's not about Maria Callas at all, except for the back story. But emotionally it is very autobiographical. There is a scene in `Master Class' when Maria Callas refers to a bouquet of flowers on the piano with a card saying, `We love you, Maria.' `It's always we love you,' she says. It's never `I love you.' It can be lonely even for someone who is getting the adulation of the world."
McNally's world got considerably less lonely five years ago, when he met Thomas Kirdahy, a public-interest lawyer who is more than 20 years his junior. The meeting came a year after the death of his longtime companion Gary Bonasorte, 45.
"I didn't expect at that point of my life to meet anyone else, but you never know what life has for you," says McNally.
It was an emotional year, he says of the first months of their relationship. His mother died, 9/11 happened, and then he was told he had lung cancer.
"I had radical surgery in two separate operations six weeks apart," he says. "They took out one-half of my lung, and then they removed about 11 chunks from the other. But it's been three years, and with lung cancer, most occurrences happen in the first three years, so it's a good sign.
In 2003, McNally and Kirdahy made their relationship legal in a ceremony in Vermont. (The union also made it to the weddings/celebration pages of The New York Times.)
Initially they saw it as a political gesture, but once they were in Vermont, it became "something deeply personal and very emotional. We were both awake the whole night before the ceremony, and we were very thoughtful and quiet and realized the enormity of it. It was very moving to look into another person's eyes and say those words in public: `In sickness and in health, for better or worse.' It is very profound.
"It was something as a gay man of my generation I never thought would be a possibility. I am 66. I was always out. But things have changed so much. Certainly Stonewall [the riots in 1969, the first major protest for gay civil rights] and AIDS changed everything. And now the move toward marriage is the final right gay men and women deserve and for which we will fight and get. I still don't get why it is a threat to traditional marriage and how it erodes the marriage of Dick and Jane in the next apartment. When I asked people in Vermont if [civil unions] were a big issue up there, and they said it was big for about a month while they were told it would be the end of life as they knew it for the institution of marriage. But it stopped being an issue very quickly because it doesn't change anything for heterosexuals."
What it does, he says, is to establish relationship rights for gay men and women in terms of insurance, health care and estates.
"Eventually the Supreme Court cannot turn this down," he says. "It is going to happen; that I don't doubt. I just hope that it's in my lifetime."
After "Some Men" opens, McNally will continue to prepare for a reading of his script for a new musical based on the Steven Spielberg film "Catch Me If You Can," written with the "Hairspray" composing team of Mark Shaiman and Scott Wittman. He is also writing "Deuce," a play about a pair of former tennis doubles partners, for Marian Seldes and Zoe Caldwell. There are also plans to produce the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical "The Visit" in Washington in September 2007 with Chita Rivera and "another big male star whom I can't say right now."
Meanwhile, even his not-so-well-known plays are getting attention. An early play, "Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?," will be presented next month at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, and the 1975 musical "The Rink" with Leslie Uggams is set for the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass., in July.
"John Doyle [who directed the current hit Broadway revival of `Sweeney Todd'] has talked about doing a revival of `The Rink' with Patti LuPone in the mother role. Originally [in the '70s, before `Evita'] we wanted Patti to play the daughter and then Liza decided she wanted to be in it and John [Kander] and Fred [Ebb] couldn't say no. I thought Liza was wonderful in it, but the critics wanted to see `Liza With a Z' and at that time she was trying to prove that she could be a character actress."
When asked about a film version of "Master Class," he says the screen rights are owned by actress Faye Dunaway. "I don't think it will ever get made with her in the starring role. If she's smart she'd produce it. But even if Meryl Streep owned the rights, it would have a difficult time getting made. It's not a part that Julia Roberts could play and Hollywood doesn't want to make movies about older people. But it's not just Hollywood. We couldn't book Chita [to promote her Broadway show `Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life'] except on `The View.' We were told that viewers don't want to see a 72-year-old."
McNally is sanguine about the vagaries of show business.
"I had no idea where I'd be at this stage of my life," he says, "but I thought I'd be some place good. I'm an optimistic person, and I think if you live a decent life things turn out decently. Overall, I think life is fair. Still, nice people die young and terrible things happen: like Gary shouldn't have died at his age, and [playwright] Wendy Wasserstein should still be with us. But that's not about fairness. That's about cancer."
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant