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
Queer team brings girl power to fully baked ‘The Wrong Girls’
Perfect film for anyone who loves stoner comedies
Generally speaking, the “Stoner Comedy” genre is aimed at an audience of “stoners,” and if you’re not one, you probably don’t get the appeal.
If you are, though, you’re likely to enjoy “The Wrong Girls,” the new indie from screenwriter Dylan Meyer in her directorial debut, which began a theatrical release on Aug. 14. The plot is ridiculous, the humor is lowbrow, and you won’t find any substance in it except for the ones that get consumed onscreen – but that’s exactly the reason why it’s pretty much perfect for anybody who loves stoner comedies, and the fact that everyone involved commits to it whole-heartedly might just makes it all the more so.
Starring Kristen Stewart (Meyer’s real-life spouse) opposite Alia Shawkat as a pair of broke, directionless best friends who share an L.A. apartment and spend an impressive amount of effort finding new and elaborate ways of consuming cannabis, it opens with them facing a financial crisis; Frankie (Stewart) is thousands of dollars in debt for a scholarship to Stanford – even though she failed out before graduating – and Molly (Shawkat), who dreams of being a professional chef, channels her creative cooking skills into creating off-the-wall recipes for cannabis-infused snacks. To make matters worse, rent is due, and – as usual – they are short.
Their situation gets a sudden surprise windfall when Frankie (through a freak case of mistaken identity) ends up in possession of a briefcase full of a mysterious liquid they assume is some kind of drug. Thinking they can sell it for rent money, they decide to try it for themselves, first, resulting in a pink-and-bubbly hallucinogenic experience in which they can hear each other’s thoughts (and their cats’ thoughts, too) – an effect that lingers even after the “trip” subsides.
Their plan to sell the substance hits a snag, however, when a cadre of gun-toting Euro-thugs in dark suits show up on the scene trying to get their hands on it. Forced to go on the run, they eventually learn that the substance they took is a top-secret experimental drug, developed by a scientist (Kate McKinnon) researching human consciousness – and that the Europeans work for a dangerous rival who wants the formula for his own nefarious purposes. Can two 20-something stoners successfully elude and overcome a team of international mercenaries on a mission? Probably not, but the superpowers they seem to be developing might improve their chances – if they can figure out how to use them, that is.
Cut from the same cloth as every weed-centric movie farce you’ve ever seen, “The Wrong Girls” leans into most of the genre’s usual formula points, first and foremost of which is that it doubles as a buddy comedy. From Cheech and Chong, through Jay and Silent Bob, to Harold and Kumar, these films have always relied on the goofy chemistry between two friends, and Mayer (who wrote as well as directed) makes a special point of following that blueprint – because it’s also where her film sets itself apart from most of the other examples within a traditionally male-dominated genre by making the buddies female instead.
It’s a simple switch, and it really doesn’t have any significant impact on the general “vibe” of the story; the dynamic is more or less the same familiar back-and-forth banter between two people who have spent years getting high together, and their antics are just as stupid. Even so, in another way, flipping the usual gender of its protagonists makes an essential difference, simply because we’re so accustomed to seeing it the other way around – but women also like to get high, so why shouldn’t we see them doing it in the movies? After all, the now-legendary Comedy Central series “Broad City” (to which “The Wrong Girls” also owes a debt of inspiration) brought a pair of stoner chicks to TV over a decade ago with the epic pairing of Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, so it’s high time (if you’ll pardon the pun) we see the same on our big screens, too.
There are other twists that spruce up the formula too – a boyfriend (Zack Fox) who sparks girl buddy jealousy by asking Molly to move in with him, the crashing of a party thrown by a corporate douchebag (Tony Hale) and provides a great target for the anti-establishment satire that’s almost obligatory for the genre, and a plot thread about giant squid biochemistry that adds an air of comedic mysticism while tapping into the “cephalopod awareness” trend that has wriggled its way into our cultural discourse around ethical seafood consumption. All of it is written and executed with a cleverness that makes it easy to laugh at all the “dumb” comedy without it feeling too much like a guilty pleasure.
Steward and Shawkat, needless to say, carry the film; they find just the right blend of authentic friendship and “train wreck” energy to make their relationship both wacky and relatable. LaKeith Stanfield brings an admirable seriousness to his role as the guy who delivers the briefcase to the wrong person before becoming a comic foil as he ends up being a reluctant ally; stoner movie veterans Seth Rogan and Kumail Nanjiani amusingly lend their voices to the girls’ two cats; but it’s McKinnon who raises the bar, entering the story late in the game to become the hands-down MVP in a comedy that is only improved by her proven gift for stealing every scene she’s in. It’s worth noting that Geena Davis turns up for a memorable appearance that feels like a nod to that grandmother of all girl-buddy films, “Thelma and Louise.”
It’s also worth mentioning the strong imprint of queer creativity that exudes from “The Wrong Girls,” which casts two queer stars in a queer-written-and-directed comedy that also features several other prominent cast members who are queer (or queer adjacent), despite not having any specifically queer story elements. Maybe it’s the camp sensibility, or the obvious lampooning of overtly toxic heterosexual “types,” or just a general feeling of irreverence and a sharply counter-cultural edge – but somehow, the whole thing comes across as an expression of queer perspective that manages to run circles around the banality that might otherwise easily have turned the movie into an unfunny slog through a territory we’ve all seen plenty of times before.
All that said, it’s important to return to the original point that stoner movies are not necessarily meant for everyone – and fresh as it might feel, “The Wrong Girls” is definitely a stoner movie. There’s a lot of humor (and we mean A LOT) that will fall flat for those who don’t “get it,” and a considerable amount of absurdity and excess which will probably only frustrate viewers without a natural taste for it. Like even the best of the genre, it’s not intended to be deep, or even coherent – it’s all just for the sake of mindless, feel-good fun for those with a taste for it. So be warned by that caveat if you think it applies to you – otherwise, we suggest you grab a pack of edibles and jump on board for the ride.
Out & About
UPDATE: Impulse Group’s ‘PrEP Pool Party’ cancelled
Organizers announce cancellation of event
Impulse Group DC was to host a “PrEP Pool Party” on Thursday, Aug. 27 at 8 p.m. at Vida Fitness: Navy Yard. However, organizers have announced that the event has been cancelled.
Visit @impulsegroupdc on Instagram for information on future events for Impulse Group DC.
Friday, August 21
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Happy Hour” at 7 p.m. at Uproar Rooftop. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Trans and Genderqueer Game Night will be at 7:00p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This is a relaxing, laid-back evening of games and fun. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Saturday, August 22
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.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.
Black Lesbian Support Group will be at 1 p.m. on Zoom. This is a peer-led support group devoted to the joys and challenges of being a Black lesbian. For more details, email [email protected].
Monday, August 24
“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]).
Queer Book Club will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. The Queer Book Club meets on the fourth Monday of the month to discuss books by queer authors. This month’s reading is “An Unkindness of Ghosts” by Rivers Solomon. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
Tuesday, August 25
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, August 26
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. 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.
Asexual and Aromantic Group will meet at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a space where people who are questioning this aspect of their identity or those who identify as asexual and/or aromantic can come together, share stories and experiences, and discuss various topics. For more details, email [email protected].
Thursday, August 27
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the Center. 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 free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
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