Three Plays By Terrence Mcnally

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.

THE STORIES: The opening play is Mr. Pintauro's DAWN: Quentin and his sister Veronica, together with his wife Pat, gather at the beach to scatter their mother's ashes. The act itself is a closure of sorts, but it stirs up conflicts between the thre

THE STORY: It's the opening night of The Golden Egg on Broadway, and the wealthy producer (Julia Budder) is throwing a lavish party in her lavish Manhattan townhouse. Downstairs the celebrities are pouring in, but the real action is upstairs

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.

This first book-length work on Terrence McNally shows how his decades in the theater have refined his thoughts on subjects like growing up gay in mannish, homophobic Texas, Shakespeare's legacy in contemporary drama, and the life-giving power of forgiveness. McNally believes that the ability to forgive--a challenge to even the most high-minded--confirms our humanity because the wrongs done to us usually don't deserve to be forgiven. The author shows how McNally's impeccable timing, his instinct for a good laugh line, and his preference for physical sensation and character over plot helps him reveal both what's important to his people and why his people are important. These revelations can shake up audiences while providing a great evening at the theater.

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

THE STORY: At a beautiful Dutchess County farmhouse, eight men hash out their passions, resentments and fears over the course of three summer weekends. There's Perry and Arthur, a professional couple of long standing, whose relationship, while stra