Happy Birthday to Playwright Terrence McNally

Terrence McNally was born today, November 3, in 1938. He is the multi-award-winning playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. McNally has been described as "a probing and enduring dramatist" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced." 

He has received the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, as well as the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. 

 

Other awards include an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, three Hull-Warriner Awards, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to his award-winning plays and musicals, he also written two operas, multiple screenplays, teleplays, and a memoir.

He has a career spanning six decades, and his plays, musicals, and operas are routinely performed all over the world. The diversity and range of his work is remarkable, with McNally resisting identifying with any particular cultural scene. Simultaneously active in the regional and off-Broadway theatre movements as well as Broadway, he is one of the few playwrights of his generation to have successfully passed from avant garde to mainstream acclaim. His work centers on the difficulties of and urgent need for human connection. For McNally, the most important function of theatre is to create community by bridging rifts opened between people by difference in religion, race, gender, and particularly sexual orientation.

McNally is married to Thomas Kirdahy, a Broadway producer and a former civil rights attorney for not-for-profit AIDS organizations. They first had a civil union ceremony in Vermont on December 20, 2003. They subsequently married in Washington, D.C. on April 6, 2010. In celebration of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states, they renewed their vows at New York City Hall with Mayor Bill de Blasio officiating on June 26, 2015.

Plays:
And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1964)
Botticelli (1968)
Sweet Eros (1968)
Witness (1968)
¡Cuba Si! (1968)
Bringing It All Back Home (1969)
Noon (1968), second segment of Morning, Noon and Night
Next (1969)
Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971)
Bad Habits (1974)
Whiskey (1973)
The Tubs (1974), early version of The Ritz
The Ritz (1975)
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1982)
It's Only a Play (1986)
Hope (1988), second segment of Faith, Hope and Charity
The Lisbon Traviata (1989)
Prelude and Liebestod (1989)
Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991)
A Perfect Ganesh (1993)
Hidden Agendas (1994)
Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994)
By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea (1995)
Master Class (1995)
Corpus Christi (1998)
The Stendhal Syndrome (2004)
Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams (2005)
Some Men (2006)
The Sunday Times (2006)
Deuce (2007)
Unusual Acts of Devotion (2008)
Golden Age (2009)
And Away We Go (2013)
Mothers and Sons (2014)
It's Only a Play (2014)

Musical Theatre:
Here's Where I Belong (1968)
The Rink (1984)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992)
Ragtime (1996)
The Full Monty (2000)
The Visit (2001)
A Man of No Importance (2002)
Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life (2005)
Catch Me If You Can (2011)

Operas:
The Food of Love (1999), music by Robert Beaser
Dead Man Walking (2000), music by Jake Heggie
Three Decembers (2008), music by Jake Hedge
Great Scott (2015), music by Jake Heggie

Films:
The Ritz (1976)
Andre's Mother (1988)
Frankie & Johnny (1991)
Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997)

TV:
Andre's Mother (1990)
The Last Mile (1992)
Common Ground (2000)