Terrence McNally (1938–2020): Theatre Changes Hearts

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Terrence McNally, the playwright who spent six decades insisting that the stage could make people understand one another, died on March 24, 2020, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida. He was 81. The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his husband, the Broadway producer Tom Kirdahy, told The New York Times. McNally had survived lung cancer and lived with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He died in the first weeks of the pandemic, with every theater in New York dark, so the community he wrote for never got to gather and say goodbye. With Ragtime back on Broadway in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival last season, this is TheaterScene.net‘s appreciation.

From Corpus Christi to the Royale

McNally was born on November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and grew up mostly in Corpus Christi, Texas. He came to New York in 1956 to attend Columbia College, graduating in 1960. His Broadway debut as a playwright, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, was a flop, but he soon found success with the farces Bad Habits and The Ritz.

His long partnership with Manhattan Theatre Club produced Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, The Lisbon Traviata, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Love! Valour! Compassion! and Corpus Christi, whose portrayal of Jesus and his apostles as gay men drew protests in 1998. He won an Emmy for the television drama Andre’s Motherin 1990. He won four competitive Tony Awards: Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, and Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993) and Ragtime (1998). In 2019 he received the Tony for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.

He wrote the books for nine Broadway musicals. Four of them were with John Kander and Fred Ebb (The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life and The Visit), two with Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Ragtime and Anastasia), and the others included The Full Monty and Catch Me If You Can. He also wrote libretti for Jake Heggie’s operas Dead Man Walking, Three Decembers and Great Scott. Mothers and Sons, his sequel to Andre’s Mother, was the first Broadway play to depict a legally married same-sex couple. Accepting his Lifetime Achievement award at Radio City Music Hall, he said: “I love it when I remember theatre changes hearts—that secret place where we all truly live.”

His work on our pages

TheaterScene.net has written about McNally’s work in 16 reviews and columns. Our critics did not always love what they saw, and they said so.

Victor Gluck reviewed Mothers and Sons, McNally’s twentieth Broadway show, starring Tyne Daly, in 2014. He found it “only partially successful though the affecting final scene is one you will long remember,” adding: “It is the sort of play you want to embrace more than you can as its heart is in the right place, but it fails to articulate what it came to say.” He returned to Daly’s performance in his review of The Substance of Fire (“Noble makes the same mistake that Tyne Daly has made in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons“), and his 2014 Tony preview listed the play among the Best Play nominees. Gluck was tougher on Second Stage’s revival of Lips Together, Teeth Apart, writing that “the play now seems dated and talky without the emotional heft to make it still seem important.”

The 2014 Broadway revival of It’s Only a Play split the house. Gluck’s review called it “a kind of Broadway comedy we don’t see very often any more. Without a thought in its head, it is a laugh riot – but only if you don’t mind that it mainly proceeds on name-dropping.” Chip Deffaa named it his favorite show of the year in his December 2014 column: it “has as strong an ensemble cast–and about as many laughs–as any comedy I’ve ever seen on Broadway.” Even so, he “almost wanted to slap McNally–one of my favorite living playwrights–for settling for some lines late in the play that are not quite up to his standards.”

The musicals drew the same mix of praise and reservations. Stefan Woych found The Visit, Kander and Ebb’s last show, to be “a pot of soup of many delicious ingredients, but no substance,” and wrote in his review that “the book is a skeleton of the original on which to drape the Kander and Ebb songs.” In his September 2017 column, Deffaa said the Anastasia book, “by Terrence McNally–another writer I very much like–is well-constructed, offering just enough suspense to keep you hooked from beginning to end.”

Revivals and new plays alike got a hard look. Darryl Reilly called the 2017 revival of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? “a painfully dated, aimlessly episodic and interminable affair,” although he set it apart from “Mr. McNally’s later, accomplished works.” David Kaufman’s review of Fire and Air, McNally’s 2018 play about Diaghilev at Classic Stage Company, observed that “no stranger to doing research for his works, Terrence McNally has evidently done a good deal of it,” but found “missing from the play is any depth to the characters.” In 2019, Kaufman called Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at the Broadhurst “a substantial look at a one-night stand,” noting that the characters’ desperation to avoid being alone, “more than anything else, is what gives the play its meaning.”

That play still sets the standard for us. Reviewing Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter in 2024, Joseph Pisano recalled “Terrence McNally’s heartfelt masterpiece” and concluded: “whereas McNally finds meaning after intimacy, Kennedy simply chooses to avoid both.”

Ragtime is where the praise has been loudest. Joel Benjamin’s review of City Center’s 2024 Ragtime gala wrote that the novel’s “many storylines were artfully tamed by the team of Terrence McNally (book), Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics),” and called the show “musical theater gold.” A year later, in his column on the Lincoln Center Theater revival, Deffaa went further: “For my money, ‘Ragtime’ is the greatest musical of the last 40 years.” He added that “Terrence McNally’s libretto preserves the key elements of E. L. Doctorow’s terrific but sprawling, densely packed 1975 novel.”

Our archives reach back further. Our 2006 fall/winter season roundup looked ahead to Deuce, his tennis play for Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. And in a November 2019 column, Deffaa recalled how Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman’s The Off-Off Broadway Book had championed McNally and other then-unknown writers who “went on to become major writers of their generation.”

Curtain

McNally is survived by his husband, Tom Kirdahy, who produced many of his works; his brother, Peter McNally, and Peter’s wife, Vicky; and an extended McNally and Kirdahy family. His family asked that donations in his memory go to the Dramatists Guild Foundation and to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, where he served on the board of trustees. TheaterScene’s full coverage of his work is collected on

his tag page.