A Perfect Ganesh

"Two outwardly unremarkable, middle-aged lady friends throw themselves into a rousing tour of India, each one having her own secret dreams of what the fabled land of intoxicating opposites will do for the suffering she hides within ..."--Page 4 of cover.

Beautifully written, moving, and very funny, Love! Valour! Compassion! gathers together eight gay men at the upstate New York summer house of a celebrated dancer-choreographer who fears he is losing his creativity... and possibly his lover. Infidelity, flirtations, soul-searching, AIDS, truth-telling, and skinny-dipping mix monumental questions about life and death with a wacky dress rehearsal for Swan Lake performed in drag. The result is a cross between a gay Big Chill and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. To read it is to join in a dance of life.

This second edition explores the territory between gay - lesbian studies, literary criticism, and religious studies. The book examines the appropriation and/or subversion of the authority of the Judeo-Christian Bible by gay and lesbian writers. Texts being focused on are 'Paradise Regained' (Milton), 'Sodom' (Rochester), 'The Life to Come' (Forster), 'The Well of Loneliness' (Radclyffe Hall), 'Desert of the Heart' (Radclyffe Hall), 'Oranges are Not the Only Fruit' (Winterson), and 'Corpus Cristi' (McNally) among others.

Terrence McNally’s canon of plays, books for musicals and opera libretti possesses such a breadth of subject matter and diversity of dramatic modes that critics have had difficulty assessing his accomplishment. This book is the first critical study to identify the four major stages of McNally’s development in terms of his understanding of how theater helps the modern person trapped in a seemingly profane existence to find a gateway to the transcendent. Drawing upon such diverse religious thinkers as Martin Buber, Mircea Eliade, Ilia Delio and Carter Heyward, Frontain analyzes the evolution of McNally’s understanding of grace, not as a gift bestowed by an all-powerful deity upon a desperate soul, but as the unwarranted—and, thus, all the more unusual—“act of devotion” (McNally’s phrase) that one person performs for another. By seeking to foment community, most importantly at the height of the AIDS pandemic, McNally’s theater itself proves to be a channel of grace. McNally’s greatest success is shown to be the creation of a theater of empathy and compassion in contradistinction to Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and Albee’s Americanization of the theater of the absurd.

This collection of essays and interviews is the first book about the drama of American playwright Terrence McNally; it examines his career to date (30-plus years), focusing particularly on the two plays for which McNally won Tony Awards for Best Play of 1995, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Best Play of 1996, Master Class. Toby Zinman, a distinguished scholar and critic, has invited none respected authorities to write about McNally's work, and has included records of the long conversations she had with the playwright about his work, his love of opera, his ideas about acting and education, and life in general. Also included are two interviews she conducted with two of his leading actors: one with the legendary Zoe Caldwell, who played the even more legendary Maria Callas in Master Class, a performance that earned her the Tony Award for Best Actress in 1996, a role McNally wrote for her, and another with the great American comic actor, Nathan Lane, whom McNally considers his foremost interpreter. The collection moves chronologically, beginning with Howard Stein's essay on the promise of the plays of the first decade, through to Cary Mazer's essay on the diva in Master Class, a play about Maria Callas' master classes at Juilliard; that essay is preceded by an essay on those famous master classes by John Ardoin, the world's foremost authority on Maria Callas. In between there are two essays debating McNally's position as a gay playwright, one by John Clum and one by Steven Drukman, both centering on the firestorm of controversy generated by Love! Valour! Compassion! In addition, there is an essay on The Lisbon Traviata by Sam Abel which discusses the play's much-revised conclusion (to murder or not to murder) and another on McNally's screenplays of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and The Ritz, by Helen Buttel, a film critic. This is followed by Stephen Watt's examination of McNally as a postmodernist, using Lips Together, Teeth Apart as his focus, and Benilde Montgomery's essay on Indian myth as it informs McNally's play (soon to be a film) A Perfect Ganesh The volume also includes in its introduction the latest information on McNally's newest projects, an extensive bibliography, and a chronology of the playwright's career.

The second edition of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture continues the groundbreaking work of the original, exploring the territory between gay/lesbian studies, literary criticism, and religious studies. This much-anticipated follow-up examines the appropriation and/or subversion of the authority of the Judeo-Christian Bible by gay and lesbian writers. The book highlights two prevalent trends in gay and lesbian literature—a transgressive approach that challenges the authority of the Bible when used as an instrument of oppression, and an appropriative technique that explores how the Bible contributes to defining gay and lesbian spirituality. Reviewers of the first edition of Reclaiming the Sacred hailed the book’s enterprise in exploring the area between literary criticism and religious studies. Whereas contemporary literary-critical theory has been slow to integrate religion and religious history into queer theory, this pioneering journal has addressed the issue from the start with a collection of thoughtful and though-provoking articles. This latest edition expands coverage to include noncanonical ancient texts, popular Victorian religious texts, and contemporary theater. Academics and lay readers interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and religious studies will gain new insights from topics such as: religious mystery and homosexual identity in Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi” same-sex biblical couples in Victorian literature homoerotic texts in the Apocrypha sodomite rhetoric in a seventeenth-century Italian text Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian messiah in her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness homosexual temptation in John Milton’s Paradise Regained Reclaiming the Sacred counteracts the manipulative and oppressive uses to which modern writers and thinkers put the Bible and the “morality” it is presumed to inscribe. An important tool for understanding the role of the Bible in gay and lesbian culture, this remarkable book makes a powerful contribution to the advancement of studies on queer sanctity.

The Decades of Modern American Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Tony Kushner: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One and Part Two (1991), Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (1995) and A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1997); * Paula Vogel: Baltimore Waltz (1992), The Mineola Twins (1996) and How I Learned to Drive (1997); * Suzan-Lori Parks: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1994) and Venus (1996); * Terrence McNally: Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997) and Corpus Christi (1998).