Arts & Entertainment
Coronavirus claims iconic LGBTQ playwright Terrence McNally
Succumbed to complications from COVID-19 at the age of 81
The theatre community, already hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, has been dealt a painful blow with the news that Terrence McNally, the 4-time Tony winning playwright whose work portrayed a rich range of human emotional experience and broke barriers in its depiction of gay life, has succumbed to complications from COVID-19 at the age of 81.
McNally, who was a survivor of lung cancer and lived with chronic COPD, died on Tuesday at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida.
Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, McNally grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, where his New York-born parents instilled in him a love for theatre from an early age. After earning a BA at Columbia University in 1960, he developed a relationship with author John Steinbeck, who hired the young playwright to accompany his family on a worldwide cruise as a tutor to his teenage sons. Steinbeck would later enlist McNally to write the libretto for “Here’s Where I Belong,” a musical stage adaptation of the author’s classic novel, “East of Eden.”
During his early years in New York, McNally also developed a relationship with fellow playwright Edward Albee, whom he met when the two shared a cab; the pair were essentially a couple for four years, during the period in which Albee wrote “The American Dream” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” two of his most important works. It was a romance that would cast a shadow over McNally’s early career, when some critics dismissed him as “the boyfriend” after the premiere of his Broadway debut, “And Things That Go Bump in the Night.” The play, which was McNally’s first effort in three acts, flopped due to poor initial reviews – attributed by author Boze Hadleigh in his book, “Who’s Afraid of Terrence McNally,” to homophobia from conservative New York critics – even after subsequent critical reaction and audience response proved to be more favorable.
After the failure of his initial foray onto the Broadway stage, McNally rebounded with an acclaimed one-act, “Next,” which featured James Coco as a middle-aged man mistakenly drafted into the army and was directed by Elaine May, and was presented Off-Broadway in a double bill with May’s “Adaptation” in 1967. Several other one-acts followed, and the playwright gained a reputation for tackling edgy subject matter with sharp social commentary, biting dialogue, and farcical situations. He also attracted early controversy for featuring onstage nudity (from actress Sally Kirkland) for the entire length of his kidnapping drama, “Sweet Eros.”
Success came his way in the seventies, when he racked up an Obie award for 1974’s “Bad Habits,” and a Broadway hit with “The Ritz,” a risqué farce set in a gay bathhouse where a straight middle-aged business man unwittingly goes into hiding to escape his wife’s murderous mafioso brother. Adapted from his own earlier play, “The Tubs,” it was subsequently turned into a 1976 film version (directed by “A Hard Day’s Night” filmmaker Richard Lester), starring original stage cast members Jack Weston, Jerry Stiller, F. Murray Abraham, and Rita Moreno (reprising her Tony-winning role as bathhouse chanteuse Googie Gomez), as well as featuring a blonde-dyed Treat Williams in an early appearance as an undercover cop.
After another series of career setbacks, McNally rebounded again in the eighties with more Off-Broadway acclaim for his play, “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” which starred Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham. The playwright has said that it was his first work after becoming sober, telling the New York Times in 2019, “There was certainly a change in my work. It’s hard to know who you are if you’re drunk all the time. It clouds your thinking. I started thinking more about my people — my characters.”
It was in the nineties, however, that McNally blossomed into a master playwright, with plays like “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” which placed AIDS squarely in the backdrop of its story about two married couples spending a weekend on Fire Island, and “Master Class,” a tour-de-force one-woman show about Maria Callas which featured Zoe Caldwell in a widely acclaimed performance.
It was also during this period that McNally wrote “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” an expansive play about a group of gay friends who spend three successive holiday weekends over the course of a summer together at a lake house in upstate New York. Transferring to Broadway after a successful debut at the Manhattan Theatre Club – with which McNally had a long association, and where he developed several of his important works – in a production directed by Joe Mantello, it was a pastoral, introspective, Chekhovian drama that offered deeply-drawn, non-stereotypical portrayals of gay characters confronting the various issues in their lives and their relationships; it was also a snapshot of life at the height of the AIDS crisis, exploring the ways in which the spectre of the disease was an unavoidable part of day-to-day life that encroached upon every aspect of gay experience. McNally’s script, bolstered by the richly human performances of an ensemble cast that included Nathan Lane, John Glover, John Benjamin Hickey, Anthony Heald, and Justin Kirk, countered the potential for moroseness with warmth and humor, and the play is now widely seen, alongside plays such as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey,” as one of the most important theatrical works of the AIDS era. A film version in 1997 reunited most of the original stage cast, though the notably straight Jason Alexander replaced Lane in the role of Buzz, the most outwardly flamboyant of the play’s eight gay characters.
It was in the nineties when McNally also established himself as an important figure in the musical genre, contributing the libretto for John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “The Rink” (a short-lived musical drama starring Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli) before going on to collaborate again with the legendary score composers on “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” their musical version of the Manuel Puig novel about the unlikely friendship that develops between a political revolutionary and a gay window dresser as they share a cell in a Mexican prison. The musical (which also starred Rivera) was a smash hit and won McNally his first Tony (Best Book for a Musical) in 1993.
In 1998, he won another Tony in the same category for the libretto of “Ragtime,” a widely-acclaimed musical adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel exploring racism against the backdrop of the turn of the 20th Century with a score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynne Ahrens.
His other two Tonys were for “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class,” in 1995 and 1996, respectively.
In his later career, McNally courted controversy once again with “Corpus Christi,” a 1998 “passion play” that queered the biblical story of Jesus and the Apostles by reimagining them as gay men living in modern-day Texas. At the time, the production was met with protests (McNally himself received death threats), although reviewers found its content to be surprisingly uncontroversial, with Jason Zinoman of the New York Times calling it “earnest and reverent” and “more personal than political.”
Other notable dramatic works included “The Lisbon Traviata,”
“It’s Only A Play,” “A Perfect Ganesh,” “The Stendahl Syndrome,” “Mothers and
Sons,” and his last, 2018’s “Fire and Air.” He also wrote librettos for the musicals
“The Full Monty,” “A Man of No Importance,” “Anastasia,” and “The Visit” (also
with Kander and Ebb, and also starring Rivera), and for the operas “Dead Man Walking,”
“Three Decembers,” and “Great Scott.”
He also wrote for television, including an Emmy-winning teleplay for the 1988 AIDS
drama “Andre’s Mother.” For film, he wrote the screenplays for the film
adaptations of his plays, “The Ritz,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” and “Frankie
and Johnny at the Clair de Lune” (retitled as simply “Frankie and Johnny”).
Besides his Tony and Emmy wins, he also earned three Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, and two Obies, as well as a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
In addition to his four competitive Tonys, he was awarded a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.
He was also the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Rockefeller Grant.
McNally is survived by his husband, Thomas Kirdahy, whom he wed in 2010 after a long relationship. Other survivors include a brother Peter McNally, and his wife Vicky McNally, along with their children and grandchildren; also listed among the survivors are Mother-in-Law Joan Kirdahy, sister/brother-in-laws Carol Kirdahy, Kevin Kirdahy, James Kirdahy, Kathleen Kirdahy Kay, and Neil Kirdahy.
Movies
Superb direction, performances create a ‘Day’ to remember
A rich cinematic tapestry with deep observations about art, life, friendship
According to writer/director Ira Sachs, “Peter Hujar’s Day” is “a film about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money.” At least, that’s what Sachs – an Indie filmmaker who has been exploring his identities as both a gay and Jewish man onscreen since his 1997 debut effort, “The Delta” – told IndieWire, with tongue no doubt firmly planted in cheek, in an interview last year.
Certainly, money is a concern in his latest effort – which re-enacts a 1974 interview between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), as part of an intended book documenting artists over a single 24-hour period in their lives – and is much on the mind of its titular character as he dutifully (and with meticulous detail) recounts the events of his previous day during the course of the movie. To say it is the whole point, though, is clearly an overstatement. Indeed, hearing discussions today of prices from 1974 – when the notion of paying more than $7 for Chinese takeout in New York City seemed outrageous – might almost be described as little more than comic relief.
Adapted from a real-life interview with Hujar, which Rosenkrantz published as a stand-alone piece in 2021 (her intended book had been abandoned) after a transcript was discovered in the late photographer’s archives, “Peter Hujar’s Day” inevitably delivers insights on its subject – a deeply influential figure in New York culture of the seventies and eighties, who would go on to document the scourge of AIDS until he died from it himself, in 1987. There’s no plot, really, except for the recalled narrative itself, which involves an early meeting with a French journalist (who is picking up Hujar’s images of model Lauren Hutton), an afternoon photo shoot with iconic queer “Beat Generation” poet/activist Allen Ginsburg, and an evening of mundane social interaction over the aforementioned Chinese food. Yet it’s through this formalized structure – the agreed-upon relation of a sequence of events, with the thoughts, observations, and reflections that come with them – that the true substance shines through.
In relaying his narrative, Hujar exhibits the kind of uncompromising – and slavishly precise – devotion to detail that also informed his work as a photographer; a mundane chronology of events reveals a universe of thought, perception, and philosophy of which most of us might be unaware while they were happening. Yet he and Rosenkrantz (at least in Sachs’ reconstruction of their conversation) are both artists who are keenly aware of such things; after all, it’s this glimpse of an “inner life,” of which we are rarely cognizant in the moment, that was/is their stock-in-trade. It’s the stuff we don’t think of while we’re living our lives: the associations, the judgments, the selective importance with which we assign each aspect of our experiences, that later become a window into our souls – if we take the opportunity to look through it. And while the revelations that come may occasionally paint them in a less-than-idealized light (especially Hujar, whose preoccupations with status, reputation, appearances, and yes, money, often emerge as he discusses the encounter with Ginsberg and his other interactions), they never feel like definitive interpretations of character; rather, they’re just fleeting moments among all the others, temporary reflections in the ever-ongoing evolution of a lifetime.
Needless to say, perhaps, “Peter Hujar’s Day” is not the kind of movie that will be a crowd-pleaser for everyone. Like Louis Malle’s equally acclaimed-and-notorious “My Dinner With Andre” from 1981, it’s essentially an action-free narrative comprised entirely of a conversation between two people; nothing really happens, per se, except for what we hear described in Hujar’s description of his day, and even that is more or less devoid of any real dramatic weight. But for those with the taste for such an intellectual exercise, it’s a rich and complex cinematic tapestry that rewards our patience with a trove of deep observations about art, life, and friendship – indeed, while its focus is ostensibly on Hujar’s “day,” the deep and intimate love between he and Rosenkrantz underscores everything that we see, arguably landing with a much deeper resonance than anything that is ever spoken out loud during the course of the film – and never permits our attention to flag for even a moment.
Shooting his movie in a deliberately self-referential style, Sachs weaves the cinematic process of recreating the interview into the recreation itself, bridging mediums and blurring lines of reality to create a filmed meditation that mirrors the inherent artifice of Rosenkrantz’s original concept, yet honors the material’s nearly slavish devotion to the mundane minutiae that makes up daily life, even for artists. This is especially true for both Hujar and Rosenkrantz, whose work hinges so directly to the experience of the moment – in photography, the entire end product is tied to the immediacy of a single, captured fragment of existence, and it is no less so for a writer attempting to create a portrait (of sorts) composed entirely of fleeting words and memories. Such intangibles can often feel remote or even superficial without further reflection, and the fact that Sachs is able to reveal a deeper world beyond that surface speaks volumes to his own abilities as an artist, which he deploys with a sure hand to turn a potentially stagnant 75 minutes of film into something hypnotic.
Of course, he could not accomplish that feat without his actors. Whishaw, who has proven his gifts and versatility in an array of film work including not only “art films” like this one but roles from the voice of Paddington Bear to “Q” in the Daniel Craig-led “James Bond” films, delivers a stunning performance, carrying at least 75% of the film’s dialogue with the same kind of casual, in-the-moment authenticity as one might expect at a dinner party with friends; and though Hall has less speaking to do, she makes up for it in sheer presence, lending a palpable sense of respect, love, and adoration to Rosenkrantz’s relationship with Hujar.
In fact, by the time the final credits role, it’s that relationship that arguably leaves the deepest impression on us; though these two people converse about the “hoi polloi” of New York, dropping legendary names and reminding us with every word of their importance in the interwoven cultural landscape – evoked with the casual air of everyday routine before it becomes cemented as history – of their era, it’s the tangible, intimate friendship they share that sticks with us, and ultimately feels more important than any of the rest of it. For all its trappings of artistic style, form, and retrospective cultural commentary, it’s this simple, deeply human element that seems to matter the most – and that’s why it all works, in the end. None of its insights or observations would land without that simple-but-crucial link to humanity.
Fortunately, its director and stars understand this perfectly, and that’s why “Peter Hujar’s Day” has an appeal that transcends its rarified portrait of time, place, and personality. It recognizes that it’s what can be read between the lines of our lives that matters, and that’s an insight that’s often lost in the whirlwind of our quotidian existence.
Out & About
Gala Hispanic Theatre’s Flamenco Festival returns
Gala Hispanic Theater will host the 21st Annual “Fuego Flamenco Festival” from Thursday, Nov. 6 to Saturday, Nov. 22.
The festival will feature American and international artists who will gather in the nation’s capital to celebrate the art of Flamenco. Guests can save 20% on tickets with a festival pass.
The festival kicks off now through Nov. 10 with the D.C. premiere of Crónica de un suceso, created, choreographed and performed by Rafael Ramírez from Spain, accompanied by renowned flamenco singers and musicians. In this new show, Ramírez pays homage to the iconic Spanish Flamenco artist Antonio Gades who paved the way for what Flamenco is today. GALA’s engagement is part of an eight-city tour of the U.S. by Ramírez and company.
The magic continues Nov. 14-16 with the re-staging of the masterpiece Enredo by Flamenco Aparicio Dance Company, a reflection of the dual nature of the human experience, individual and social, which premiered at GALA in 2023.
For more information, visit the theatre’s website.
Friday, November 7
“Center Aging Friday Tea Time” will be at 12 p.m. in person at the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s new location at 1827 Wiltberger St., N.W. To RSVP, visit the DC Center’s website or email [email protected].
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Silver Diner Ballston. This event is ideal for making new friends, professional networking, idea-sharing, and community building. This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Saturday, November 8
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 12 p.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Sunday Supper on Saturday will be at 2 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This event will be full of food, laughter and community. For more information, email [email protected].
Monday, November 10
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
“Soulfully Queer: LGBTQ+ Emotional Health and Spirituality Drop-In” will be at 3 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This group will meet weekly for eight weeks, providing a series of drop-in sessions designed to offer a safe, welcoming space for open and respectful conversation. Each session invites participants to explore themes of spirituality, identity, and belonging at their own pace, whether they attend regularly or drop in occasionally. For more details visit the DC Center’s website.
Genderqueer DC will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a support group for people who identify outside of the gender binary, whether you’re bigender, agender, genderfluid, or just know that you’re not 100% cis. For more details, visit genderqueerdc.org or Facebook.
Wednesday, November 12
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
“Gay Men Speed Dating” will be at 7 p.m. at Public Bar Live. This is a fresh alternative to speed dating and matchmaking in a relaxed environment. Tickets start at $37 and are available on Eventbrite.
Thursday, November 13
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a free weekly class focusing on yoga, breathwork, and meditation. For more details, visit the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s website.
Superb direction, performances create a ‘Day’ to remember
Erica Deuso elected as Pa.’s first openly transgender mayor
LGBTQ legal leaders to Supreme Court: ‘honor your president, protect our families’
Suicide and the policy crisis facing trans Americans
Nancy Pelosi: an LGBTQ appreciation of the retiring House speaker emerita
‘Sandwich guy’ not guilty in assault case
Gay speedskater racing toward a more inclusive future in sports
FBI thwarts Halloween terror plot targeting Mich. LGBTQ bars
Blue wave hits Northeast: Sherrill and Mamdani lead Democratic comeback
Trial begins for man charged with throwing sandwich at federal agent
-
District of Columbia3 days ago‘Sandwich guy’ not guilty in assault case
-
Sports3 days ago
Gay speedskater racing toward a more inclusive future in sports
-
Michigan5 days ago
FBI thwarts Halloween terror plot targeting Mich. LGBTQ bars
-
New Jersey4 days ago
Blue wave hits Northeast: Sherrill and Mamdani lead Democratic comeback
