Terrence McNally

In high school McNally was encouraged to write by a gifted English teacher, Maurine McElroy (1913–2005).

Terrence McNally (November 3, 1938 – March 24, 2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter.

Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards.

McNally was born November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Hubert Arthur and Dorothy Katharine (Rapp) McNally, two transplanted New Yorkers from Irish Catholic backgrounds.

His parents ran a seaside bar and grill called The Pelican Club, but after a hurricane destroyed the establishment, the family briefly relocated to Port Chester, New York, then to Dallas, Texas, and finally to Corpus Christi, Texas.

There Hubert McNally purchased and managed a Schlitz beer distributorship, and McNally attended W.B. Ray High School.

Despite his distance from New York City, McNally's parents enjoyed Broadway musicals.

When McNally was eight years old, his parents took him to see Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, and on a subsequent outing, McNally saw Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I.

McNally later said: "When I saw On the Town, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: 'That's where I want to live.' I've never regretted it."

He enrolled at Columbia College in 1956.

There he especially enjoyed Andrew Chiappe's two-semester course on Shakespeare in which students read Shakespeare's plays in roughly the order of their composition.

He joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote Columbia's annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L. Kleban and directed by Michael P. Kahn.

He graduated in 1960 with a B.A. in English and membership in Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Starting a career that covered both off-Broadway and Broadway, his plays cried out against Vietnam, satirized stale family dynamics, mocked sexual mores and became a part of the social protest movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1961, McNally was hired by novelist John Steinbeck to tutor his two teenage sons as the Steinbeck family took a cruise around the world.

On the cruise McNally completed a draft of what became the opening act of And Things That Go Bump in the Night.

Steinbeck asked McNally to write the libretto for a musical version of the novel East of Eden.

After graduation, McNally moved to Mexico to focus on his writing, completing a one-act play which he submitted to the Actors Studio in New York City for production.

While the play was turned down by the acting school, the Studio was impressed with the script, and McNally was invited to serve as the Studio's stage manager so that he could gain practical knowledge of theater.

His earliest full-length play, This Side of the Door, deals with a sensitive boy's battle of wills with his overbearing father and was produced in an Actors Studio Workshop in 1962, featuring a young Estelle Parsons.

In 1964, his next play And Things That Go Bump in the Night put homosexuality squarely on stage which brought him the ire of New York City's conservative theatre critics.

It opened at the Royale Theatre on Broadway to generally negative reviews.

The play explores the psycho-social dynamic of anxiety that leads one to preemptively and defensively accuse others of creating problems that in actuality result from one's own insecurity.

McNally later said, "My first play, Things That Go Bump in the Night, was a big flop. I had to begin all over again."

Nevertheless, the producer, Theodore Mann dropped the price of tickets to $1.00 which allowed the production to run with sold-out houses for three weeks.

Next (1968), which brought him his greatest early acclaim and was directed by Elaine May and starred James Coco, follows a married, middle-aged, businessman who has been mistakenly drafted into the armed forces.

Botticelli (1968) centers on two American soldiers standing guard in the jungle while making a game of the great names in Western Civilization.

¡Cuba Si! (1968) satirizes the disdain that many Americans feel for the idea of revolution though United States was itself born out of a revolution.

It starred Melina Mercouri.

Sweet Eros (1968) is about a young man who professes his love to a naked woman he has gagged and bound to a chair.

In Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971) he celebrates while mourning the ineffectiveness of the American youth movement's conviction to "blow this country up so we can start all over again."

He was vice-president of the Council of the Dramatists Guild from 1981 to 2001.

In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.

His career spanned six decades, and his plays, musicals, and operas were routinely performed all over the world.

He also wrote screenplays, teleplays, and a memoir.

Active in the regional and off-Broadway theatre movements as well as on Broadway, he was one of the few playwrights of his generation to have successfully passed from the avant-garde to mainstream acclaim.

His work centered on the difficulties of and urgent need for human connection.

He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.

He died of complications from COVID-19 on March 24, 2020, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida.