border, in Monterey, Mexico, that he discovered what was to become one of the grand passions of his life, the voice of Maria Callas. (Or, as he then heard and believed it to be, Maria ‘‘Ca-yas.’’)

Later, as a freshman at Columbia, McNally camped by the Met box office for three days to buy a standing-room ticket for Callas’ debut in Bellini’s Norma. ‘‘She gave only 20 performances in New York, and was cheered—and booed—at nearly every one,’’ he recalls.

Maria Callas is, of course, the subject of McNally’s Broadway hit Master Class, written for actress Zoe Caldwell. And Callas is also the voice heard on the elusive, pirated recording of the opera La Traviata that forms the comic core of his hilarious and terribly sad play The Lisbon Traviata.

McNally’s character Mendy, the fanatical record collector in that play, expresses his rapture over Callas when he says, ‘‘She’s given me so much. Pleasure, ecstasy, a certain solace, I suppose. Memories that don’t stop. This doesn’t seem to be such a terrible existence with people like her to illuminate it. We’ll never see her like again. How do you describe a miracle to someone who wasn’t there?’’

Let’s Go See What He’s Written.

McNally, now 57, always intended to be a writer, but assumed that would mean a journalist. While at Columbia, however, he began some serious theatergoing and found a new inspiration. ‘‘I sort of drifted into playwriting,’’ he claims with characteristic modesty.

In fact, he got an early start in the playwriting business. Still in his 20s, having recently ended a relationship with playwright Edward Albee, he saw his first show, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, produced at Minnesota’s prestigious Guthrie Theater. The play then moved to New York—where critics absolutely and unequivocally destroyed it.

That negative reaction may have resulted from the Albee connection. As McNally grimly recalls, when critic Walter Kerr and his wife, Jean, entered the theater, he heard Jean mutter, ‘‘Well, let’s go see what the boyfriend has written.’’

Reviews ranged from ‘‘the worst play ever written’’ to the Daily News critic’s comment that half the dialogue was inaudible—‘‘and this was the part I liked best.’’ Remarkably, McNally found the strength to pick up a pen and try again.

His next play, Next, directed by Elaine May and starring James Coco, was the comic story of a middle-aged man mistakenly drafted into the Army. It fared much better, and McNally began to build a solid reputation. And his work began to evolve, developing greater complexity and tackling tougher issues as the years passed and his expertise grew.

Over time, he explains, ‘‘I really began to develop a sense of what makes a play work. I think you have to separate playwriting from literature,’’ he adds. ‘‘There’s a very practical side to writing for the theater, and it’s pretty hard to learn that all by yourself working in your room. Being a good playwright is learning how to collaborate with directors, designers, actors . . . and finally, with the audience.’’

Unconditional Love.

For McNally, part of that education has come from his longtime collaboration with the small, notfor- profit Manhattan Theatre Club, a relationship he describes as ‘‘unconditional love.’’ McNally firmly believes that the security it provides has given him the room to grow.

Of course, it would be perfectly possible for a playwright of McNally’s current reputation to skip the Manhattan Theatre Club phase and head right for the bright lights of Broadway. After all, he has had three works—The Kiss of the Spider Woman, for which he wrote the libretto, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Master Class—staged on Broadway within the past couple of years, and all won Tony Awards for either Best Play or Best Libretto. Yet he remains faithful.

His abiding loyalty to his theatrical home is eclipsed perhaps only by his loyalty to the theater in general, at a time when more and more talented writers are heading west, chasing the big dollars to be made writing screenplays. For McNally, that is simply not an option, although he has adapted several of his own plays for film, including the movies Frankie and Johnny, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, The Ritz, and the upcoming Love! Valour! Compassion!

‘‘I don’t dream in movies,’’ he states matter-offactly. ‘‘I dream in theater. I like the physical reality of theater. Movies are like looking through a very pretty window at Saks Fifth Avenue, but it’s one step removed from the moment. At the theater, you have to be there that night. You feel like an active participant.’’

McNally is also one of a tiny handful of playwrights who has always supported himself solely through his craft. He admits, however, that one year that meant living on something like $3000.

That low-income period doubtless occurred during the great writing slump after his theatrical tell-all comedy Broadway, Broadway was savaged by critics during its Philadelphia tryout. This time the barbs really did wound, to the point where he quit writing for about three years. The turning point came when someone in a store stepped up and asked if he was Terrence McNally. McNally expected to hear something about one of his successful plays, but the stranger said, ‘‘I thought so. I recognized your voice from the Texaco Opera Quiz,’’ for which he is a regular panelist. Immediately, he envisioned his obituary: ‘‘Terrence McNally, the former Texaco Opera panelist, died yesterday’’—and realized it was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and get on with it. And he did just that, proceeding to write some of the most densely textured and critically successful plays of his career.

What Do You Think as a Member of the Human Race?

While McNally has never made a secret of his homosexuality, one can hear the weariness in his voice when the subject of his stature as ‘‘gay playwright’’ comes up. While he recognizes that such designations are inevitable (‘‘if people want gay liberation, this is part of the price’’), he also anticipates a day when ‘‘such designations will just drop away, as people realize that gay men and women are everywhere in the fabric of our society.’’ Or as one character says in Love! Valour! Compassion!, ‘‘No one cares what you think as a gay man, doc. That wasn’t the question. What do you think as member of the human race?’’

McNally, as a member of that race, is thinking more than he once did about far more serious subjects. If his early plays, such as the door-slamming, Feydeau-style farce, The Ritz, made audiences laugh till they cried, later McNally works make theater-goers laugh as they cry. His recent plays have dealt, in ferociously touching ways, with issues ranging from AIDS to aging to infidelity to the simple struggle to connect in a world where human bonds seem ever more fragile. Comparisons to Chekhov are now making their way into reviews of his work, and everything he writes these days seems to win some kind of award. He’s riding high. And, as he completes the libretto for the new musical Ragtime, pens a new play for Manhattan Theatre Club, and awaits the premiere of the film Love! Valour! Compassion!, he says he’s in one of the happiest periods of his life.

But then he seems to be fundamentally a happy person. In his work, as in his conversation, McNally’s good humor and native optimism assert themselves. To see a Terrence McNally play is to know that, whatever the subject of the day, there will be ample opportunity for laughter.

Yet make no mistake. These very funny plays are very serious indeed. Or as Johnny says to Frankie in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, ‘‘This isn’t small talk. This is enormous talk.’’

Source: Melissa Burdick Harmon, ‘‘Love! Valour! Compassion!,’’ in Biography, Vol. 1, No. 2, February 1997, pp. 58–62.

Playwright Terrence McNally has been faced with the same persistent question about his work throughout his career: ‘‘What does this play mean for the gay community?’’ Perhaps it should not be surprising, considering that in more than three decades of playwriting, McNally has contributed such wellknown, gay-themed creations as the homosexual bathhouse farce The Ritz (1975), the gay breakup drama The Lisbon Traviata (1985), and Corpus Christi (1997), his retelling of the life of Jesus in which Christ and his disciples are all homosexuals. Still, McNally resists being categorized. ‘‘I’m always accused of saying that I’m not a gay playwright,’’ he lamented in a 1997 interview with the Advocate, a national gay and lesbian news magazine. ‘‘I’m not saying that at all. I’m a gay man who is a playwright. It’s not just about my sexuality.’’

Like many successful playwrights, though, McNally has found that his work has taken on a dimension and significance larger than himself, which leads to critics, scholars, and the public seeking more and more meaning and stronger political stands from his plays. His 1995 Tony Award– winning play Love! Valour! Compassion! was not only praised as a masterful comedy-drama with sparkling wit and fascinating characters; it was also hailed as an important landmark, a huge step forward in the march toward recognition, rights, and acceptance of homosexuals in America. Reviewer David Sheward asserted in Backstage, ‘‘Gay theatre reaches another watershed with Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!,’’ while David Kaufman declared in the Nation, ‘‘Never has our progress seemed more assured or more richly proclaimed than it does today,’’ with the arrival of McNally’s play.

At least in part, these expectations of McNally’s work arise from the new ways in which American culture analyzes art and literature, and the ways in which academic and popular culture help define personal, sexual identities. During the thirty-plus years that McNally has worked as a professional playwright, a number of critical theories have evolved that shed light on what it means to forge an identity outside of mainstream society. The fields of gay/ lesbian studies and queer theory have been particularly useful in exploring the evolution of gay characters and themes in McNally’s plays. These similar but distinct critical approaches also offer a means of comparing and contrasting McNally’s later work, such as Love! Valour! Compassion!, to earlier ‘‘gay drama,’’ such as the 1968 Mart Crowley landmark The Boys in the Band and even Tony Kushner’s epic 1991 Angels in America, to see how theatre and society have changed in a few short decades.

The fields of gay/lesbian studies and queer theory are relatively new ones, developing in the 1980s and 1990s respectively. They both grew out of feminist theory, which only had its start in the mid-1970s. Feminist scholars were among the first academics to challenge the assumption that one mainstream, universal identity—the white male citizen—should serve as the foundation for all literary criticism, social studies, and political thought and action. Feminist theory considered gender (designations of ‘‘male’’ or ‘‘female’’) to be not one set of natural, inborn characteristics common among everyone sharing the same physical traits, but instead a group of ideas, concepts, signs, and signifiers that society assigns to ‘‘male roles’’ or ‘‘female roles’’ that defined, and sometimes limited, the way those roles functioned and interacted in the world. For feminists, there was no single universal ‘‘truth’’ that defined the way bodies, minds, and personalities, whether male or female, functioned as a result of biology. Rather, bodies, minds, and personalities were formed through a combination of biology and societal beliefs and expectations about them that were based on gender.

Essentially, feminist scholars asserted that differences among people matter. A number of factors, including race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality all interact, producing an endless variety of identities that cannot be rigidly defined (‘‘white, middle-aged male’’ or ‘‘young, black female’’) and, indeed, can actually change over time. This also suggested that gender is not ‘‘essential’’ to an individual’s ‘‘identity’’ but is only a component of a much larger system of identity crafting.

Gay/lesbian studies incorporate many of the same scholarly techniques as feminist theory to consider social structures and social ideas about sexual identity. It considers especially how homosexuality and heterosexuality have been historically defined and how societal views of what is ‘‘normal’’ and what is ‘‘abnormal’’ influence what is depicted in art, literature, and popular culture. Analyses of characters in works of literature by gay/ lesbian studies scholars often tend to push characters toward broader categories of definition. A bisexual character, for example, may be considered a homosexual character who has not yet found his ‘‘true’’ identity.

Like gay/lesbian studies, queer theory examines and critiques both ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘abnormal,’’ or ‘‘deviant,’’ behavior, particularly sexual behavior, and insists that all such behaviors that contribute to forming categories of identity (for example, ‘‘gay,’’ ‘‘lesbian,’’ ‘‘bisexual,’’ ‘‘transvestite,’’ ‘‘fetishist’’) are social constructions, not just natural or biological states of being. Because of this, there are nearly as many variations on being ‘‘queer’’ (different from the ‘‘norm’’) as there are people who identify with one or more of these categories. As a result, queer theory tends to allow for a larger number of identity categories, without passing judgment on whether one or another is more ‘‘authentic’’ and acceptable.

When Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band first premiered onstage in New York in 1968 and then on movie screens across the country two years later in 1970, it immediately challenged some of the concepts of ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘abnormal’’ sexual identity believed to be held by ‘‘mainstream’’ America. Although gay/lesbian studies and queer theory had not yet been described as formal means of criticism, the popular press still recognized the significance of Crowley’s work. The play was hailed as a watershed event, a turning point in the history and culture of homosexuals in America. Although previous plays and films had included homosexual characters and themes, they were typically minor and marginalized or depicted as ‘‘deviants’’ to be scorned and punished. The Boys in the Band, though, presented for the first time on a mainstream stage a group of men discussing their sex lives, dancing together, and even kissing and having simulated sex on stage. ‘‘Mart Crowley’s work was so assertively gay and so deliberately outrageous,’’ John Rickard recalls in a retrospective article in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, ‘‘that it was bound to shock the largely non-gay audiences that flocked to see the play and, far greater numbers, the movie.’’

The play’s setting is a birthday party that thirtyyear- old Michael is giving for his friend, Harold. The guests include the slightly younger Donald, a lover of Michael’s from years before and now a good friend who sees the same analyst; Emory, a campy interior decorator; Bernard, a black bookstore clerk somewhat insensitively dubbed ‘‘the African Queen’’; and Hank and Larry, the only ‘‘couple’’ at the event (though Larry still pursues other men while Hank, divorced school teacher and the father of three children, seeks a monogamous relationship). Two outsiders join this group of longtime friends: an attractive but dumb hustler named ‘‘Cowboy,’’ who is presented by Emory as a birthday present for Harold, and Alan, Michael’s heterosexual friend from college who stops by for the evening after a fight with his wife.

The play is alternately hilarious, melodramatic, and tragically serious. Sometimes it has the feel of high farce like McNally’s The Ritz; and at other times it follows a roller-coaster ride of barbed dialogue and warped relationships similar to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. After getting off to a mostly comic beginning, the play turns toward trouble when Michael, a struggling alcoholic who has been on the wagon for five weeks, downs a glass of gin. As the alcohol pours, the men settle in for sharp exchanges, some of which now seem dated and stereotypical at best and horribly offensive at worst. At one point, Emory, who shares a special relationship with Bernard, tells his black friend, ‘‘Why don’t you have a piece of watermelon and shut up.’’

The height of the play’s emotional ride climaxes in a game of truth called ‘‘Affairs of the Heart’’ that Michael coerces the group into playing. In the game, each man must phone the one person that he has truly loved, scoring points based on whether he makes the call, speaks to the person, identifies himself, and confess his love. Bernard and Emory share stories of loves they lost when they were young. Hank ends up calling the answering service he shares with Larry and leaving a message that he loves him. Alan, who does not want to play the game, is finally pushed into making a call by Michael, who is sure Alan is going to call a mutual college friend named Justin and confess his love and deep-seated gay identity to him. Alan does make the call and leaves the message, but when Michael takes the phone from him, he discovers that Alan has been speaking to his wife, Fran, attempting to reconcile their differences.

In many ways, the success of The Boys in the Band in 1968, and again on screen in 1970, represented progress for those with some kind of gay identity in America. It proved that homosexual characters could be accepted by mainstream audiences for who and what they were. Still, the question was raised whether the gay characters themselves actually accepted their identities, when so much of what they did and said to each other in the play seemed filled with conflicting emotions, animosity, and self-doubt. Much of that anguish is summed up in one of the play’s more famous lines, when Michael challenges his friends, ‘‘You show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.’’

This kind of grim humor is heard throughout the play. Sometimes it is voiced as a soul-searching sigh of resignation from a gay man constantly battling a straight world, as when Michael sadly laments, ‘‘If we could just learn not to hate ourselves quite so much,’’ or when Harold arrives late to his own birthday party and exclaims, ‘‘What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy—and if it takes me a while to pull myself together and if I smoke a little grass before I can get up the nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s [g——d——] business but my own.’’ At other times, it is delivered as an indictment, a condemnation, as when Harold brutally confronts Michael after Alan’s phone call to his wife and tells him, ‘‘You are a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be. But there is nothing you can do to change it. Not all your prayers to your God, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you’ve got left to live. You may very well one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough—if you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate—but you will always be homosexual as well. Always, Michael. Always. Until the day you die.’’

While mainstream audiences flocked to theatres and cinemas around the country to see Crowley’s work, many gay viewers were less enthusiastic. Gay activists protested both the play and the movie. Some critics, too, complained that the characters were too stereotypical or too self-loathing. Even years later, in a 1995 essay for the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Joe Carrithers criticized the movie version of Crawley’s work, saying:

Such a film negatively depicts those gay lives that do

not follow heterosexual paradigms, reinforcing longheld stereotypes of gays as sad, troubled, and unhappy people. Gay viewers, hoping to see themselves and their lives reflected on the screen, find instead two equally distasteful options: either they must behave like straight men if they want to succeed, or they must accept a definition of their identity imposed by straight men.

Still, the author himself insists that the characters in The Boys in the Band were drawn from real life and that the story is a product of its time, of an age when homosexuality was a crime in most states and was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (a designation that would not change until 1973). In a 1995 documentary called The Celluloid Closet, Crowley said, ‘‘I knew a lot of people like those people. The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself.’’

In the years between The Boys in the Band and Love! Valour! Compassion!, a number of plays featuring homosexual casts and addressing homosexual themes and contemporary issues found their way to Broadway, to varying degrees of popular acclaim. Viewed through the prism of gay/lesbian studies and queer theory, each also contained characters struggling with their identities, sometimes trying to separate their ‘‘natural’’ characteristics (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) from those traits and categories society has assigned them (drag queen, closeted homosexual).

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) was an all-out assault on the American government and healthcare industry that allowed AIDS (for a time called the ‘‘gay plague’’) to ravage the homosexual population in the country for years before the disease began to significantly affect heterosexuals and government resources responded to the need. Harvey Fierstein won the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play with Torch Song Trilogy, three short plays about a flamboyant drag queen, a semi-closeted bisexual schoolteacher, and their lovers and friends. And perhaps most famously, Tony Kushner won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991–1992 for his epic, two-part play Angels in America, which depicts the struggle against AIDS in both the gay and straight communities, set against the backdrop of the conservative decade of the 1980s.

For all their appeal to both gay and straight audiences and for all their critical acclaim, each of these plays, like The Boys in the Band, also presents one or more characters that are marginalized, conflicted, ambivalent, or even filled with selfloathing because of their sexual orientation and confused identity. In some ways, they seem to persist in the notion that there is such a thing as a ‘‘gay identity,’’ even though, as Timothy Scheie argues in ‘‘Acting Gay in the Age of Queer,’’ an essay for Modern Drama, such an identity no longer exists. ‘‘The idea of ‘gay’ as a self-evident category of identity and an easily definable community has lost considerable currency in the age of the queer,’’ Scheie asserts. ‘‘From a queer perspective, the articulation of sexuality that presupposes a stable ‘gayness’ assumes a naïve, uncritical and even dangerous position.’’

One of McNally’s accomplishments, then, in terms of queer theory applied to his play, is that to a man all eight characters seem comfortable with who and what they are. No one is closeted, withdrawn, or remotely ambivalent about his sexuality. While sexuality does not completely define the men, it joins many other unique and individual characteristics to inform who they are and influences much of what they say and do in the play. There is no uniform ‘‘gay identity’’ that all of the characters fit or struggle against. They are all gay, but they are also each unique and wear their ‘‘gay identities’’ differently.

The middle-aged, mature, and stable Gregory is a successful dancer and choreographer who may share in some of the stereotypical, societal expectations of gay men. (He collects antiques in his meticulously restored hundred-year-old country home and choreographs an all-male drag dance number from Swan Lake for an AIDS benefit.) But ultimately Gregory is defined more by his commitment to his blind lover, Bobby, and his passion for his art than by these less important surface qualities.

Arthur and Perry are successful professionals (an accountant and a lawyer) in a fourteen-year relationship that will last them the rest of their lives. It is not idyllic: They bicker, fight, separate, and reunite as most committed couples do. Arthur once cheated on Perry, an act that damaged but did not destroy their union. Perry does not manage his anger well and often curses in a vulgar fashion and reveals his bigotry toward racial and ethnic minorities. Of all the men, he may also be the most reserved in his outward expressions of his sexuality and homosexuality. He expresses shock at the more extroverted Buzz when he appears on the lawn naked except for an apron and high heels, does not join the other men when they go skinny-dipping in the lake, and refuses to dress in drag to dance in Gregory’s Swan Lake. Still, as Scheie notes, these are simply individual preferences related to sexual identity. ‘‘Making visible differences . . . is a double-edged sword,’’ Scheie writes. ‘‘One person’s Gay Pride march is someone else’s idea of a freak show, or yet another’s sell-out to the myth of a tolerant inclusive pluralism.’’ Perry’s reactions do not mean he is conflicted or withdrawn, but merely that he has selected to craft his identity in different ways.

At times, McNally even seems to be poking fun at the idea of a single, homogenous, dominant identity against which all other ‘‘queer’’ variations must be compared. At one point, the flamboyant and musical-loving Buzz is insisting to his friends that what they all really need is more ‘‘gay music’’ written by gay composers. Perry points out that there is no such thing as ‘‘gay music,’’ to which Buzz retorts:

Well, maybe there should be. I’m sick of straight people. Tell the truth, aren’t you? There’s too [g—— d——] many of them. I was in the bank yesterday. They were everywhere. Writing checks, making deposits. Two of them were applying for a mortgage. It was disgusting. They’re taking over.

Buzz’s mock reverse bigotry is meant for humorous effect, but it also instantly raises in the mind of the heterosexual reader or audience member the objection that there is no such thing as a conspiracy of ‘‘straight people,’’ with all the similarities and single-mindedness that category suggests, all intent on ‘‘taking over’’ the world. ‘‘Straight people,’’ like ‘‘gay men,’’ may share some basic traits, but they are defined more by their differences than their similarities.

One of the play’s most revealing exchanges of dialogue about the role of sexual identity occurs between John, the middle-aged English rehearsal pianist and failed playwright, and his twenty-something boyfriend Ramon, the handsome Puerto Rican dancer and ‘‘outsider’’ in the group of men. In an after-dinner conversation that turned heated over the question of what they truly care about in the world and how they should help their fellow man, Perry asks for feedback from the ‘‘younger generation’’ (Bobby and Ramon). Ramon begins to respond, ‘‘As a gay man, I think—’’ He is cut off by John who rebukes him, ‘‘No one cares what you think as a gay man, duck. That wasn’t the question. What do you think as a member of the human race?’’

It would be hard to imagine any of the characters in The Boys in the Band leaping into the debate with such an observation. For them, in 1968, all questions seemed to point toward ‘‘what you think as a gay man.’’ Thirty years later, while the struggle among homosexuals and heterosexuals in America for universal acceptance continues, the way in which many people, artists and critics included, define their identities and present themselves to the world has significantly changed.

Source: Lane A. Glenn, Critical essay on Love! Valour! Compassion!, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2004.

Editor’s Note: Terrence McNally and I first spoke on November 7, 1994, a week after Love! Valour! Compassion! opened, when he had come to Philadelphia to address a Playwrights’ symposium. The Philadelphia Theatre Company would be premiering Master Class in March of 1995, so both of those plays were naturally very much on his mind. We spoke again at the Manhattan Theatre Club on December 9, 1994; both these long conversations (of many hours each) have been combined. McNally’s comments on Master Class have been extracted and preface the essays in this book which deal with that play.

[Toby Silverman Zinman:] Music is obviously so important to you—in Lisbon Traviata and certainly in this new play [Master Class—which at this point I had only read in typescript]. Do you wish you wrote operas instead of plays? Does this new play aspire to an operatic state?

[Terrence McNally:] If I were a composer, I would write opera—opera is certainly an influence on my work. It was certainly one of the ways I became attracted to theatre and attempted to make sense of the human experience which I think is, by definition what art is, to try to explain what it’s like to be alive, or in love, or what joy is. The biggest influences on me as a child were opera and musical comedy. The Metropolitan Opera existed on the radio, I fell in love with opera in the sixth grade; I was at a Catholic school and a nun played Puccini love duets for us, and I liked it right away. The way most people like strawberry ice cream cones— that’s how it was for me with Italian opera. Not all opera, of course; it took me a while before I enjoyed Mozart and Wagner. When I was much much younger, about five or six, my parents took me to see Annie Get Your Gun, and then when I was twelve my parents took me to see The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence, and those were the only two theatre experiences I had as a child—both were on trips to New York. But the opera was something I was able to fantasize and dream about because of the Texaco broadcasts, and I used to build little sets in the little theatre I made. But I never connected any of this to playwriting or theatre—I don’t know what I thought it was.

I surely did not want to be a playwright until I came to New York and started to go to the theatre— much, much later. Maybe my senior year in college it occurred to me to write a play. Opera was something I enjoyed passively—I think I’m a very good listener—I participate with my body, I twist and turn in my seat, but I can’t play the piano, I can’t sing, so opera is something I can enjoy passively. After seeing those musicals I certainly never said, I want to write a play, they weren’t something I could participate in, but they’re obviously very important to me as an influence. That’s how I knew what it was like to sit in a dark room and be transported, taken somewhere else. I’ve only worked on two musicals and those fairly late in my career—The Rink, the first show I did with Kandor and Ebb, is only about eight years ago, and then Kiss of the Spider Woman was only two years ago.

You say that opera made you know what it was like to be alive—that’s a very extravagant take on the human condition, so lavish and extreme.

Well, I think my plays are lavish and extreme— I’m not a naturalistic writer—I think sometimes I’m operatic, but to me my aesthetic of theatre is influenced by these early experiences. My plays are sometimes operatic, there are arias, there are duets— Lips Together is my most operatic play—Mozart even opened the play. And now when I see it or read it I say, My God, these are quartets, or trios or duets. My early plays are all arias.

Love! Valour! is the least musical—that is, there’s less music in it—they sing at the beginning of each act, but I chose it because I like the idea of seven men singing a capella, and Stephen Foster’s music I enjoy—it’s welcoming, it’s friendly music, and it seemed the right way to open the play. Some of my early plays have more references to music— actually Lips Together has many more than this play. Music, opera is not naturalistic. If we listen to Traviata, we know that people don’t sing in real life, but a good performance of La Traviata, such as the one I heard Maria Callas give at the Met, moves you in a way that is timeless and absolutely up to the moment. So I take opera very seriously, and I think art should inspire. So although I take theatre very seriously, one may not always achieve that level of intensity.

I suppose I have to grit my teeth and refer to my plays as ‘‘comedies,’’ which I get a little tired of, but people do like handles I suppose, and I think there’s laughter in my plays, and I think I have a comic sensibility, but I don’t think I write comedies.

I think my plays are plays, which implies a certain artificiality. I was surprised that so many people referred to Frankie and Johnny as a naturalistic play, which I don’t think it is at all. I think it’s the most poetic play I’ve ever written, but because they made real sandwiches and made a western omelet in the second act, people think it’s naturalistic, but it’s not. That’s why opera is important—it’s not naturalistic.

The two musical comedies I saw had two extraordinary star performers, Ethel Merman and Gertrude Lawrence, and my work is best served by actors who are (and this is not a pejorative word) performers and less well served by intensely ‘‘Method’’ actors. I found my true artistic collaborator in Nathan Lane or Kathy Bates—actors who find the feeling in the lines without having to add ‘‘uhs,’’ ‘‘you knows,’’ ‘‘I means’’—and just go with the language. They say the words and the feeling follows. So many actors have to have the feeling before they can say the line—it’s not my music. I believe very profoundly that there are McNally actors, just as there are Guare actors or Mamet actors, actors who serve my vision. In this last play I very much found a McNally director— Joe Mantello—I am rapturous about how beautifully served I am by this production of [Love! Valour! Compassion!]. As a director he has found the larger thing I’m writing about. The set for the play is nonexistent; it’s a place you can act in, yet it becomes all things—lakeside, the interior of house, it moves with fluidity. The designer, Loy Arcenas, found the poetic metaphoric space which I could only describe haltingly in the first stage directions as ‘‘bare stages’’—but he knew what I meant. I didn’t want real rooms with beds and chairs—the whole first speech is describing a house the audience can’t see. Other directors wanted to get a horsehair sofa there, but I didn’t want a sofa; I wanted what that sofa meant to that man.

I don’t think I’m any more modest or immodest than any other playwright, but I do think we’re vastly overpraised when a play works, since it’s such an elaborate collaboration. Without the right director and designers, a play is dead in the water. It’s nice when you have a successful play to get a lot of praise, but it has to be shared with other people.

[I mention the swan ballet inLove! Valour! Compassion!]

That’s the sort of theatre moment you live for—I thought it would work, but they were standing there in their tutus and then the lighting designer brought up those footlights, and they suddenly looked like Degas ballerinas. The costume designer gave them those little headbands. It’s the most absurdlooking moment in the play. It begins with great hilarity, and then—it’s just a wonderful section in which I feel I can’t do better than that as a writer or find better collaborators than this.

Two days before we started [Love! Valour! Compassion!] we still didn’t have the full cast. I had been willing to cast months earlier because I was getting lazy and panicked and I wanted to go away for the summer, but I spent the summer in New York seeing actors. It was supposed to have been the last play of last season, but if we had done it then, it would not have had Nathan Lane or Stephen Spinella or Joe—I don’t think he could have done this and been in [Angels in America—in which Mantello played Louis Ironson in the Broadway production].

So few theatre people go to the theatre. I go to the theatre three times a week or so. People see Love! Valour! Compassion! and say, how can I get Joe Mantello? Six months ago, it was Joe Mantello, who are you? I’d seen three plays the man had directed and I thought he was extraordinary. So I’m smart that way.

Would you talk some more about your ideas about acting and how they relate to playwriting?

American acting went through a period when it was so involved with ‘‘inner truth’’—but the truth of the actor not the truth of the character. If there was a kind of decline in our theatre, it might have been that the actors were not rising to the plays. The Actors Studio had a playwrights unit, but no great plays came out of it. I think the inner truth of Blanche DuBois is important, not the inner truth of the actress playing her.

I have always responded to technique—an actor who will cry on cue, even if it’s pure technique that’s making him cry. We went through a period of theatre being contemptuous of craft—in playwriting too—and I think our generation of writers went through a period of being overpraised for anything we wrote. In the sixties, if you wrote a play and you were under thirty, you could get it done in New York. A lot of young American writers were overpraised and never developed a sufficient technique in playwriting, so when your youth is gone, what are you going to do? I’m a great believer in technique, and I’m sorry it’s such a dirty word.

I think a lot of young people today are writing plays who don’t know what a good play is—they read Streetcar, Long Day’s Journey, Death of a Salesman and that’s it—one play by each playwright, what’s the biggest hit, what’s the easiest to rent the video of—there’s no respect for the body of work or for the man. Streetcar is just the play that made Marlon Brando a star.

I’ve been teaching, and students are very resistant to talking about craft in playwriting. It’s not enough to write what you feel—it’s what they tell singers, ‘‘Don’t sing on your capital, sing on your interest.’’ I find that young people say, ‘‘I don’t know what to write about.’’ That’s like saying, ‘‘I’m bored.’’ I couldn’t possibly live long enough to write all the plays I dream of writing. It’s slower each time, and I guess as I get older I’m unwilling to be alone for the period of time it takes to write them and see them into production. It’s very lonely—like a boat drifting out, in the sense that once you really begin to write a play, you’re really not participating in society; you may be with people, but you’re really not listening to them. I just can’t imagine saying I don’t know what to write about.

What happens once the play is finished?

I do a lot of work in rehearsal—that’s too long, that’s too short, that’s not funny, that’s not clear. Joe Mantello was very helpful editing Love! Valour! Compassion! I had trouble ending it, and he took the last eight lines and moved them a page earlier— made an enormous difference. You needed the information in those eight lines, but it had never occurred to me to move them. By the time a play opens, the cast knows the characters better than you do—some of the best lines and scenes were not there in the original version—a lot of my work is in the first few weeks of rehearsal—they inspired me to write them. If you just wrote it all by yourself, then why bother to go to rehearsal if you’re not going to change anything?

So collaboration is important to you?

I accept that theatre is a collaboration. Edward Albee called me the other day and said, ‘‘You’re such a goody-two-shoes. I just read some interview where you said theatre’s a collaboration. Do you really believe that?’’ And I said, ‘‘Yes, I really do. And you really don’t, do you?’’ And he said, ‘‘No, I don’t.’’

I think being a playwright is being 100% responsible for what happens on stage, which means acknowledging what other people have done. If you’re the playwright, your name is on the set; it’s on the lighting; it’s on the costumes—It’s not enough to say here’s the script, I hope they’ll do it right. And you have to learn—only Nathan could have taken that line in Love! Valour! Compassion! about having a boyfriend and hollered to the audience, ‘‘which I don’t.’’ There’s the lonely part, writing it, and then you get to play with all these fabulously talented people—and I’ve been lucky, working with really great actors.

[Kathy Bates, who starred in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, is one of the few actors McNally considers his ideal interpreters; this short list of actors, including Zoe Caldwell, is headed by Nathan Lane (an interview with him appears with the essays onLove! Valour! Compassion!since he was starring in that show at that time). F. Murray Abraham, for whom McNally wrote Frankie and Johnny and who had been in four of his plays, has not worked with McNally since a scheduling change combined with a movie commitment forced him out of Frankie and Johnny. (‘‘And he hasn’t spoken to me since. It just seems silly to get mad.’’) Abraham got his original McNally role as Tommy Flowers at an open casting call. McNally affectionately tells the story of how Abraham came to the audition straight from the airport, having just gotten off a plane from Rome, and still had his suitcase with him. He was told the audition was only for actors with agents. He just waited all day until 7 P.M., and finally McNally let him read. ‘‘He read three lines and I said, ‘‘It’s yours.’’ ‘‘He did four of my plays in a row—I wrote Bad Habits specifically for him and the part of Chris in The Ritz, which he was brilliant in.’’]

In Master Class you have Callas say, ‘‘Words mean something. Vowels are the inarticulate sounds our hearts make. ‘Oh.’ Consonants give them specific meaning.’’ Do you feel that way about English?

Yes—not when I’m talking to you but on stage, in the theatre. That’s one of the reasons I respond to an actor like Nathan—he relishes each word—so many actors don’t delight in language, it’s just ‘‘what are my lines?’’ and they say the words—not ‘‘what a wonderful rhythm this has’’ or ‘‘how interesting’’—and my work especially seems to bring out something in him. I hadn’t seen Love! Valour! Compassion! in quite a while, and I went back and watched the third act—Nathan was better than I’d ever seen him, it was incredibly emotional, he had the whole audience sobbing, but it wasn’t a new performance either, if you know what I mean— he hadn’t changed what the director or the other actors expected of him. He’s never added an ‘‘uh’’ or a comma—he’s impeccable—100% what I wrote, not a breath more. I don’t work with actors where 90% is yours and 10% is theirs—I just wouldn’t tolerate that. Nathan doesn’t do it just for me—he does it for Neil Simon or John Guare. He said the only music the actor has to work with is what the playwright gave him, so he said, why would I start adding? My character’s in the words and not in extraneous stuff. Which is exactly the way Callas felt about music—it’s in the notes Bellini, Verdi, Rossini wrote, so don’t f—— around with it. The truth is there, and you bring what you can.

Your career has been closely associated with the Manhattan Theatre Club; how has that affiliation affected your work?

Well, my first play was done when I was twenty-three; now I’m fifty-six. That’s a lot of years. I’ve had several careers. My first play—done on Broadway—what a phenomenon, a disaster with the critics, then the Off-Broadway years, then Broadway, Broadway closed in Philadelphia, then regrouping, beginning again with Manhattan Theatre Club—I did Bad Habits with them way up on 74th Street. So I’m on my fourth career, now. I’ll always be very proud of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?, and I’m very proud of The Ritz.

With the Manhattan Theatre Club, I consider myself as fortunate as any playwright who’s ever lived. They made such a commitment to me—they don’t make me compete with myself, and they’ve gone out a limb for me so many times. A lot of my plays have been successful, but that last one, Ganesh, was not as successful as Lips Together. Another theatre would have said, let’s do a workshop of Love! Valour! Compassion!; let’s make sure we have a hit this time, but they don’t do that to me, and I can’t tell you the freedom.

I’m not like that hypothetical writer who’s trying to write a play that he or she thinks the theatre wants to produce, I’m writing what I want to write, and I’m pleased when other people like it. But Lynne Meadow [Artistic Director of Manhattan Theatre Club] isn’t making me feel I owe them a hit. So many people say they’re committed to a writer, but what they really are is committed to a writer of a successful play, and when they read the next play, and they don’t think it’s going to be as successful as the last one, they say, well, we’ll take a raincheck. I think it’s amazing that this play was as successful as it was—when I turned it in, I don’t think Lynne thought for one second that this play was going to be this kind of success. I’m sure that if you answer those matchbook cover ads, ‘‘Learn to Be a Writer,’’ they tell you ‘‘be true to yourself,’’ and so often we aren’t. When I wrote Frankie and Johnny, I thought it would never be produced, but Lynne said she’d produce anything I wrote, and we did it in a workshop, then in a small theatre, then in a big theatre. Each time I thought, well, it’ll stop here, and it went on to become a movie. I thought, it’s of interest to people who have just turned forty—wouldn’t interest an older audience, wouldn’t interest a younger audience, and . . .

I’ve never written a play that is actively hostile to an audience, which if you’re really angry is a temptation. I can’t talk about my development as a writer without talking about the Manhattan Theatre Club—without that theatre, I wouldn’t be here—I can’t imagine my life. During the preview of It’s Only a Play, which is sort of how I hooked up with that theatre, Lynne said: I’ll produce your next play sight unseen. It was a few days before Christmas, and it was the greatest Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten. In a funny way I didn’t quite believe her—I couldn’t believe it—but she meant it, and she’s meant it ever since.

It’s a great responsibility, but I keep saying to myself, write what you want to write and be truthful and people may not like it but they’ll respond at some level. When it gets dishonest, then . . . The Manhattan Theatre Club has an older audience— average age is about sixty, and they tend to be fairly conservative, and I say to myself, Oh, I better not do this. Then I say, no, write the play, they will survive it or they’ll walk out, but it’s not going to kill anybody and you’re not going to close the theatre. It’s not as though you raised $4 million for Broadway. Even if this [Love! Valour! Compassion!] had been the biggest flop in their history, they’d still be opening the next show [since it’s a subscription season]. So I don’t say to myself, ‘‘I owe it to Lynne’’—she never said that, that’s you. So I’m so grateful to them.

I think of myself as someone trying to earn a living as a playwright, and my friends as people trying to earn their livings as playwrights—that’s a challenge, and it’s hard, and I think I’ve been lucky and I’ve persevered. This is my life, right here in this building [Manhattan Theatre Club]—they’ve done eight plays of mine in ten years. The commitment has to be to the writer—anybody would have produced Streetcar Named Desire—where were the producers at the end of his life for Ville Carre? Every writer has valleys—nobody goes from masterpiece to masterpiece. Shakespeare did not go from Hamlet to Lear to The Tempest.

Love! Valour! Compassion!has generated a good bit of critical controversy—both in and out of the gay community, from both the conservative Right and the Queer Left—about your treatment of these characters. How does it fit into the history of gay drama?

That’s hard to answer. I didn’t out of the blue write the first gay play—there was Boys in the Band. But historically? That’s for other people to answer. My very first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, had gay characters in it, but the big difference was that was really a shocking play in its day, and I don’t think Love! Valour! Compassion! is particularly shocking. People discuss the nudity in it, but what I’m really proud of is that everyone has tolerated and accepted an enormous amount of affection and tenderness between men. The most common comment I get is that by the end of Act One, they forget they’re gay men and just think of them as human beings they can identify with, and I take that as a compliment. They are specifically these eight gay men, but they’re individual people; I didn’t write them as generic types. Everyone identi- fies with one or two or maybe even all of them. People say I was moved by these people; I wasn’t threatened by them; I wasn’t harangued by them; I wasn’t intimidated by them; they didn’t seem so exotic to me—I know these people. There’s a humanity going back and forth between the actors and the audience—you can feel it in the theatre.

Are other art forms, besides music, an influence on your work? The set design of Love! Valour! Compassion! seemed to me very painterly, the last scene especially, much like an Eakins.

Both dance and music make me feel inarticulate— they do things that I think playwriting can’t. Dance is very important to me. I think dance is the best way of depicting love, physical, sensual love between people. Certainly I think that’s hardest to convey in theatre. Love is expressed fabulously in dance—I think sexual passion is expressed better in dance than in words. Dance is about transitions—in theatre that’s the hardest thing—so you go to the ballet and outside the theatre are these wonderful ballet photos, and they are not poses, but they are moments in time. How did they get there? Baryshnikov was not born six feet in the air. That’s all about transitions. Going to the dance has made me freer as a writer in many ways. There’s a freedom in dance that I’m trying to find in my writing. The transition between comedy and the serious—if anything I pride myself on doing it’s those transitions which some critics have faulted me for—that’s how I see life. It’s like last night—I was walking along a street, and I fell down an unseen incline and ripped the most expensive suit I ever bought in my life. No one prepared me: get ready, you’re about to fall on your ass.

I go to museums a lot—I get to the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] or the Modern at least once a month. It’s important to have kindred people who are trying to talk about the same things you’re talking about. So you can say to a designer, it’s sort of like Matisse here, or to talk about music and say, it’s the sort of a moment that reminds me of . . . It’s nice to know that you’re not alone.

I still go to the theatre I bet three times a week—and that’s over fifty-two weeks a year—so I bet I see a hundred and fifty plays a year, and the other four nights are divided between ballet and opera. I think it’s so important to see what’s going on in other arts.

I’ve never been bored for a moment of my life in New York—I’ve been bored almost every other place but never in New York. I had my bags packed to move to New York from age twelve. I went from my high school graduation to the Trailways bus terminal, but I thought I was going to be a journalist. Operas were something you could see if you lived in a big city. Plays were really the last component of all this for me.

Shakespeare comes up in your plays as well as your conversation so often. Would you talk about that influence?

He’s the most obvious influence. Every play of his has a different sound world, a different texture to it—that is such genius—the poetry, the language, the sounds of Othello are different from the sounds of Lear are different from the sounds of Twelfth Night. That’s a goal to aspire to. As you get older, you come to appreciate the non-judgmental quality in Shakespeare’s writing. When I think of my earlier work, it’s much more judgmental, writing your opinions of characters—these are good people, these are bad people—Shakespeare just writes the people. I love the democracy of his plays which I have never really attained in mine. You can’t write a Shakespearean play—if I were a composer I’d want to be influenced by Mozart—a role model. His daring to say ‘‘Never never never never never’’— everything to be learned about playwriting can be learned from that one moment. Shakespeare is the original show-biz kid: let’s put a show on! He’s not a poet dreaming in a garret but a very practical man with a lot of competition.

I had a wonderful high school English teacher and a professor at Columbia who taught us Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays chronologically, so I have a sense of the playwright’s career. He followed Hamlet with Measure for Measure—you don’t jump. That’s what I meant about transitions—what can a playwright learn from ballet? Ballet is all about transitions. You don’t just write a great scene, you have to get there—how do you get them on stage? How do you get them off? I had a really oldfashioned education and I’m so grateful for that now.

Your plays are often called Chekhovian. Is Chekhov a conscious influence?

I’m not as interested in plot as I used to be, or in the social issues of the day. When I was in college I thought Wild Duck was better than anything in Chekhov, but now I’ve come to appreciate Chekhov. With And Things That Go Bump in the Night, sections of it were influenced by Albee, but after that I found my own voice. Chekhov is an influence, Beckett is an influence, but I don’t write like them.

I don’t get the logic of imitation. When I teach playwriting, whoever’s been the hit of the season, that’s who everybody writes like—Mamet, Durang, Wasserstein. But this is what I try not to think about when I’m writing—I try to keep it to ‘‘He says, She says.’’ If I started to worry about my style, I’d dry up. It’s occurred to me over the past few years that I’m not interested in the overview; what I’m interested in is the small moment—I think there’s enormous drama in that.

I think I have an instinct to tell a story in space and time, not narratively; I’m not a novelist manqué. It’s a natural inclination—the only formal training I had in playwriting was sitting in the last row of the second balcony.

Source: Terrance McNally with Toby Silverman Zinman, ‘‘Interview with Terrance McNally,’’ in Terrance McNally: A Casebook, edited by Toby Silverman Zinman, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 3–15.

‘‘I’m always accused of saying that I’m not a gay playwright,’’ Terrence McNally insists. ‘‘I’m not saying that at all. I’m a gay man who is a playwright. It’s not just about my sexuality.’’

To McNally, the distinction is obvious. But his critics haven’t always agreed. At a time when gays and lesbians want their heroes loud and proud, McNally’s tough stance on his own gay identity has often put him at odds with gay activists. As a result, he’s become increasingly reticent to talk on the record about gay issues. In fact, after years of requests, this is the first time he has agreed to speak with The Advocate since 1988.

‘‘I really hate talking about this because it always comes out wrong,’’ he says, explaining why he’s hesitant to discuss gay topics. ‘‘It doesn’t come out wrong in my life. It comes out wrong when I read about what I allegedly said, and I feel very misinterpreted.’’

However, in his work McNally never holds back. It’s no small irony that this playwright—who shies away from gay issues off the stage—has addressed the gay experience more than any other playwright of his generation. And in addressing the gay experience, he’s, helped to define it.

Since his Broadway debut in 1965, McNally has consistently introduced audiences to gay themes and gay characters. Among his most famous works are 1975’s gay bathhouse farce The Ritz; 1985’s breakup drama The Lisbon Traviata; 1991’s gaythemed comedy Lips Together, Teeth Apart; and 1992’s hit musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (for which McNally wrote the book, winning a Tony award for his efforts). Add to that list 1994’s Tony award-winning Love! Valour! Compassion!—now adapted as a film to be released nationwide May 16. It follows a tight-knit group of eight gay men and the changes that one summer brings to them.

Along with these gay landmarks are several works by McNally that don’t always address the gay experience—at least directly—including 1987’s twoperson drama Frankie and Johnnyin the Claire de Lune (later given the big-screen Hollywood treatment in 1991 as Frankie and Johnny) and 1993’s spiritual fantasy A Perfect Ganesh. The diversity of his work is yet another issue that has put McNally at odds with some gays and lesbians. The playwright cites 1995’s Master Class—for which he won his second Tony award for Best Play—as a prime example. Although the play treats audiences to a fictional evening with gay icon Maria Callas, McNally says the gay press ignored it. ‘‘It’s like I was a gay playwright three years ago because I wrote a play about eight gay men,’’ he says. ‘‘But there’s as much in Master Class that I want to say to my gay brothers and sisters as there was in Love! Valour! Compassion!’’

The rigidity that McNally sees within gay circles is a source of frustration for him. ‘‘Sometimes you want to say to the people who criticize you, ‘What more can I do?’’’ he says. ‘‘I’m out. I hope I’ve made a contribution to our society.’’

Yet he’s all too aware that some gays don’t think he contributes enough. ‘‘Why am I being attacked?’’ he snaps. ‘‘Because I say I hate the expressions ‘gay theater’ ‘gay plays,’ ‘gay playwrights’? Those expressions are so limiting. It’s a way to say to the rest of the world, ‘You don’t have to deal with me. I’m a harmless fairy.’’’

In other words, McNally is determined to compete on a level playing field—not discriminated against but not indulged either. He illustrates his point by talking about his latest project, Ragtime. McNally wrote the book for the highly acclaimed production, a musical version novel of E.L. Doctorow’s novel that opens in Los Angeles June 15 and moves to New York in December. The rest of the show’s creative team is straight, but McNally adds that’s a moot point. ‘‘They all know I’m gay,’’ he says. ‘‘We don’t talk about my sexuality. We talk about the script of Ragtime.’’

McNally is already steeling himself for a chilly reception from the gay press, simply because Ragtime contains no gay characters. ‘‘Which doesn’t mean I don’t do my bit for the ‘cause’ today,’’ he says. ‘‘I do my bit for the cause if Ragtime is a f—— ing good show and people say, ‘You know, the book writer is a big queen.’’’

For McNally, 57, visibility is the ultimate political act. ‘‘I think the most important thing we do in our lives is to be out,’’ he says. ‘‘But I think being out is all we can do. Then just live a life that’s of use to other people.’’

McNally never had to come out. The first time he hit the public eye, the New York press outed him. In those days the only big news about McNally was his lover—Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Edward Albee. ‘‘No one had ever heard of me other than gossip that Edward and I had lived together for about six years,’’ says McNally. ‘‘So when my first play came out, it was reviewed as a play by a gay playwright.’’

The play was 1965’s And Things That Go Bump in the Night. It concerned an eccentric family living in self-imposed exile in their basement. It featured two gay characters. The critics savaged it. McNally now sees the play’s failure partly as the result of homophobia—not to mention what was perceived as his riding on the coattails of Albee’s fame. ‘‘The press didn’t know we had been broken up for about a year,’’ says McNally. ‘‘So they were reviewing Edward Albee’s boyfriend—and they were going to get me.’’

After the show closed McNally swore off playwriting and spent the next year and a half as the assistant editor of his alma mater’s alumni magazine, Columbia College Today. With the encouragement of friends and colleagues, he finally ventured back into the theater. And by the mid ’70s he had begun to work at the astonishing pace that he’s been known for ever since.

‘‘I read the reviews of And Things That Go Bump in the Night,’’ says Boys in the Band playwright Mart Crowley. ‘‘It was an enormous failure. How Terrence ever got the stamina, the guts, the courage, the moxie, the sheer will to go on, I’ll never know.’’

It’s not only his staying power that sets McNally apart from his peers but the sense of adventure he brings to his work: ‘‘Terrence doesn’t write the same play over and over again,’’ says playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. ‘‘You might see that it’s all by the same author, but you also see that there are real experiments with form and content.’’

Especially gay content. Although McNally incorporated gay themes into his work from the beginning of his career, it wasn’t until The Ritz that he pulled out all the stops. ‘‘To me, The Ritz was the most subversive play that has ever been on Broadway,’’ he says. ‘‘Here was a sex farce about gay men back in the early ’70s, and the villain in that play is the heterosexual who’s humiliated at the end. People were laughing hilariously at what they’re supposed to be terrified and appalled by.’’

With The Lisbon Traviata, however, McNally learned a harsh lesson about gay story lines in his work: Much of the straight audience wasn’t ready to watch gay love onstage. The play was roundly criticized in the press for what McNally describes as its frank sexual talk. ‘‘There were times that the straight men in the audience would look at their watches or put their arms around the woman they were with. It was when there was affection between the gay characters,’’ he says ‘‘But I was so tired of gay plays where everybody was just an opera queen. Queens, people can deal with. Gay men having real emotions and feelings and dicks is much more threatening to people.’’

McNally kept those criticisms firmly in mind as he wrote Love! Valour! Compassion! ‘‘Almost the first image you see is of two men—who are practically naked—kissing,’’ he says. ‘‘I wanted to get that over with.’’ Admonishing an invisible audience, he adds, ‘‘If you’re not going to be able to deal with men kissing, then leave now.’’ This time most audience members stayed.

McNally adds that Love! Valour! Compassion! was just as much of a political statement for him as was The Ritz. ‘‘People came to the play because it won a Tony award, but there was a point when you could feel the audience embrace the characters,’’ he says. ‘‘When they do, the most obvious response is, ‘I identified with these people.’ And I consider that important.’’

McNally believes it’s just as important that his gay messages are realistic, not melodramatic. ‘‘I don’t feel as disenfranchised as some plays or movies try to make me feel,’’ he says. ‘‘We’re not Jews in Elizabethan England forced to live outside London, with Shakespeare writing The Merchant of Venice. You couldn’t write the gay equivalent of a Shylock today,’’ he says, referring to Shakespeare’s Jewish villain. ‘‘That’s how much we’ve been accepted. That’s how much we’re in the mainstream.’’

And mainstream acceptance of lesbians and gays is the basis of McNally’s political views. ‘‘Being gay isn’t enough anymore,’’ he says. ‘‘The stakes are high now. We asked for acceptance, and we got it. What are we going to do with it?’’ The playwright quickly answers his own question: ‘‘Take it and be judged by the same standards that everybody else is.’’

Source: Terrence McNally with Alan Frutkin, ‘‘Love! Valour! McNally!,’’ in the Advocate, No. 731, April 15, 1997, pp. 31–33.