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Arts & Entertainment

Texan Terrence McNally, ‘one of the great playwrights of the 20th century,’ dies at 81 from coronavirus

He lived in Dallas and Corpus Christi as a child before moving to New York and winning four Tony Awards.

The coronavirus has now claimed a major figure in the arts, one who spent years growing up in Texas. Playwright Terrence McNally, a four-time Tony Award winner, died Tuesday. He was 81.

Once referred to as “the quintessential man of the theater” by actress Zoe Caldwell, McNally died from complications related to COVID-19, according to his publicist, Matt Polk. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001 and twice underwent surgery.

Born in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1938, McNally moved with his family to Dallas when he was a child and then to Corpus Christi, where he lived until he entered Columbia University in New York City in 1956.

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But his love affair with the theater began long before that.

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He often spoke glowingly of a trip he and his parents took to New York when he was eight. They saw Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman. On a later trip, he saw Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I. Both productions left a lasting impression on the boy from Texas.

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McNally soon embraced playwriting, but his streak of signature works, the ones that won him awards and elevated him to the front rank of American playwriting, as the Los Angeles Times noted Tuesday, did not begin until 1987, the year he turned 48.

These were among his most successful: Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), The Lisbon Traviata (1989), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) and Master Class (1995).

He also left a profound impact locally, having authored plays that continue to resonate in Dallas’ gay community. Uptown Players had a huge hit with McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! In 2004 and again in 2016, when the company staged Mothers and Sons.

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Kevin Moriarty, artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, reacted to McNally’s passing by calling him “one of the great playwrights of the 20th century.”

His death, Moriarty said, “is heartbreaking for everyone who loves theater and opera. To think that he survived the AIDS plague in the 1980′s, and gave voice to so many gay men of his generation in the process, and then fell victim to this new plague. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

“His ability to write snappy comic delight was matched by the humanity with which he infused his stories and his fearlessness about writing larger than life characters. He is leaving behind a large and important body of work.”

It is, Moriarty said, a body of work that will continue to resonate powerfully — and historically — among gay people: “As a gay man growing up at a time when being gay was still stigmatized and often left in the shadows of stories, I was deeply moved and inspired by Terrence’s work. He gave voice to a generation of gay men and put us on the stage. He created flamboyant, bitchy, operatic, witty, smart, infuriating characters who had nuance and depth.”

Teresa Coleman Wash, executive artistic director of Bishop Arts Theatre in Oak Cliff, arranged for McNally to speak in 2015, in an appearance arranged by the Dramatists Guild Foundation.

“He was an incredibly kind and generous person,” Wash said Tuesday. “He always treated me like a professional. The fact that he took the time to be a part of our speakers’ series and allowed me to interview him spoke to the kind of person he was. We are just so devastated that he’s no longer with us. I remember from our conversation when he was on our stage how he talked about the elementary school teacher who had been so inspirational for him. In fact, he was so emotional during that interview.”

Bishop Arts Theatre Center founder and artistic director Teresa Coleman Wash is pictured...
Bishop Arts Theatre Center founder and artistic director Teresa Coleman Wash is pictured during a rehearsal of Down for #TheCount, a festival of women's plays at Bishop Arts Theatre Center.(Louis DeLuca / Staff Photographer)

McNally was well known for having also written such beloved musicals as Ragtime, Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Full Monty. More recently, he penned the musical adaptations of such hit movies as Catch Me If You Can and Anastasia, both of which played on Broadway.

His four Tonys came for Best Book of a Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993); Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! in 1995 and Master Class, 1996); and Best Book of a Musical (Ragtime, 1998).

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As a screenwriter, he wrote 1991’s Frankie and Johnny, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer and 1976’s The Ritz, which starred Rita Moreno and was adapted from his own Broadway play.



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But his gift in dealing with issues that defined being gay might well serve as the most fitting epitaph for his career.

“In the shadow of the AIDS epidemic,” wrote Mike Boehm in the Los Angeles Times, “McNally, who was openly gay and in 2000 lost his longtime partner, Gary Bonasorte, to the disease, met the demands of that critical time with a warmer, more embracing vision than he’d shown in his first quarter-century of work.”

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In his first Tony Award-winning play, Love! Valour! Compassion!, he wrote about eight gay men spending holiday weekends together under the shadow of AIDS, testing and affirming bonds.

He won a second Best Play Tony for Master Class, which Boehm called “a loving but hardly fawning portrayal of opera diva Maria Callas, which became a meditation on the extreme commitment and sacrifice exacted from those compelled to reach for the greatest artistic heights.”


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As with any playwright, the sour sometimes mingled with the sweet.

In 1998, his play, Corpus Christi, opened in New York. The play portrays Jesus Christ as Joshua, a young gay man who grew up in Corpus Christi before recruiting 12 disciples (several of whom he has sex with) before getting crucified in Jerusalem.

“After the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and other Christian groups protested last season — there were even threats of violence — Manhattan Theatre Club first announced it was canceling the production in the interest of its patrons’ safety," wrote Lawson Taitte, then the theater critic for The Dallas Morning News. “The national theater community rose up in a single howl of dismay, the theater put the play back on its schedule, and this week’s premiere became the most anticipated theatrical event of the season. It’s ironic that the very people who thought the play’s ideas blasphemous brought it so much attention, because the work itself would otherwise have died quietly in an atmosphere of gentle embarrassment. Mr. McNally is the American theater’s most honored playwright in the second half of the 1990s, and it’s amazing that he could be guilty of such banality.”

In the preface to Love! Valour! Compassion!, McNally addressed the dual worlds of playwriting and being gay in a way that serves as a lasting statement for his career:

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“I think I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a gay man at this particular moment in our history. I think I wanted to tell my friends how much they’ve meant to me. I think I wanted to tell everyone else who we are when they aren’t around. I think I wanted to reach out and let more people into those places in my heart where I don’t ordinarily welcome strangers.”

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