As a quiet child growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, Terrence McNally began early to “make a theater in his head” while listening to popular radio shows. His parents, Hubert and Dorothy, former New Yorkers, encouraged his interest in the arts and occasionally took him to Broadway plays. McNally says that seeing Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun and Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I started him thinking of a career in the theater.

At seventeen he entered Columbia University as a journalism major, and he took advantage of being in New York by seeing “every single play on Broadway” from a back-row seat. At the time, Columbia had an important tradition, a yearly varsity show. As McNally was about to graduate, there was no one to write the script for the performance, so he volunteered. With music and lyrics by Ed Kleban (who later wrote A Chorus Line), it was a smash hit; the poster of the show is still the only one hanging in McNally’s office.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he was awarded a traveling fellowship and went to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. There he wrote a play, which he sent to the Actors’ Studio in New York. Molly Kazan, Elia Kazan’s wife, read the work and thought that McNally had talent but needed some practical experience in stagecraft. For the next two years, he worked as stage manager at the Actors’ Studio, where he did menial work but also learned his craft.

During 1961 and 1962, McNally went on a world tour as a tutor to John Steinbeck’s teenage sons. He then supported himself as a film critic while he completed And Things That Go Bump in the Night, first presented at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, under a Rockefeller grant, and then on Broadway. The reviews of this nightmarish rendering of what the playwright terms “the choice of evil, which is a constant, over chaos, which is not necessarily a good” were uniformly derisive.

McNally returned to magazine work until, in 1966, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and began writing some one-act “comedies” with dark undertones. The most noteworthy of these was Next, about an overweight middle-aged man mistakenly drafted into the army. Paired with Adaptation, by Elaine May, who also directed, the play ran for more than seven hundred performances. McNally, who is unsparing in his admiration for May, has commented, “Everything I learned about playwriting I learned from Elaine.”

However, two full-length plays, Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? and Whiskey, were not well received. Critics generally agreed with Richard Watts of the New York Post that McNally had a “talent for going short distances, but seemed to have serious difficulties filling out an entire evening.”

Returning to the one-act format in 1974, the playwright paired two thematically related plays, Ravenswood and Dunelawn, as Bad Habits. In the absurdist tradition, two sanatoriums are contrasted: one where the inmates act out their aggressions, the other where they are “helped” by being strapped into straitjackets, confined to wheelchairs, and given injections. This play won the Obie Award for the 1973-1974 season.

Next came The Ritz, a farce set in a homosexual bathhouse. It was a failure, as was his next effort, the original version of It’s Only a Play, which sent McNally into a period of nonproductivity for almost six years.

Then came Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune and The Lisbon Traviata to mark the beginning of an almost totally “new” McNally, who had one success after another. His subsequent plays continued...