The Lisbon Traviata

THE STORY: The first act is set in the fussily ornate apartment of Mendy, a ferociously dedicated opera buff who begs and cajoles his friend Stephen to let him borrow his copy of the pirated Maria Callas recording of La Traviata made during

The tragicomedy play revolves around Stephen, a depressed literary editor and opera fanatic. Stephen especially adores Maria Callas and dishing the latest gossip with his best friend, Mendy, a wildly flamboyant and catty opera queen. They talk late into the night in an attempt to distract Stephen from his unraveling relationship with his partner. When Stephen returns home to confront his lover, a tragedy erupts on the scale of a grand opera.

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 “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy. Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance. These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships. Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

THE STORY: A gay community in Fire Island provides an unlikely setting for two straight couples who are discovered lounging poolside, staring out to sea. Sally, married to Sam, a New Jersey contractor, has inherited the house from her brother who died of

THE STORY: The most controversial and talked about play of the 1998 theatrical season begins: We are going to tell you an old and familiar story. But from that point on, nothing feels quite familiar again. What follows is a story that parallels t

The Lisbon Traviata, is a powerfully moving tragicomedy about a crumbling homosexual marriage. And in Frankie and Johhnie in the Claire de Lune, a man and a woman, not young, not old, no great beauties, either one, come together in a fresh and witty display of emotional fireworks. McNally himself describes the final piece, the bitingly honest and uproariously funny It's Only a Play, as his attempt to describe what it was like to work in Broadway in the 1980s.

Acts of Intervention traces the ways in which performance and theatre have participated in and informed the larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship and AIDS in the United States in the last fifteen years.