Playwright Terrence McNally
From Lips Together, Teeth Apart to Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams
Terrence McNally is a playwright who's fascinated by music as well as by the theatre. He was born in Florida in 1939 and raised in Texas, but his plays, like Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), are utterly steeped in the theatrical and musical culture of New York City, where he has lived since 1956.
He loves his music indiscriminately: opera as well as show tunes. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (filmed as Frankie and Johnny in 1991 with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino) is titled for Debussy's beautiful piano piece "Claire de Lune"; many of his characters quote Broadway lyrics to each other all the time, and he's such an opera fan that he's even been featured on radio's Texaco Opera Quiz. It's natural, then, that he should be one of those relatively rare playwrights who's equally comfortable writing regular drama or music theatre.
"As a child, the first theatre I knew was music theatre," he told me when he was working on Kiss of the Spider Woman in Toronto in the early '90s. That show earned him a Tony Award for Best Book (Musical) in 1993. He earned the same award again in 1998 for Ragtime, and was nominated in 2001 for The Full Monty. (He has also won two Tonys for Best Play: for 1995's Love! Valour! Compassion! and the following year's Master Class.)
One might comment that, while his non-musical shows are original stories, his musicals are adaptations (from books, from films), but McNally would quibble. "I don't think I've ever done an adaptation," he says. "You can't top the novel as a novel. You can't better the film as a film. Shakespeare wrote - what - one original play? The whole idea of an original play is rather 20th-century."
McNally's latest show, about a couple in love with the theatre, runs this summer at New York's Primary Stages. Titled Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, it features Michael Countryman, Alison Fraser, Nathan Lane, Darren Pettie, R.E. Rodgers, Marian Seldes and Miriam Shor, and runs from August 18 to October 16 (Don Amendolia replaces Nathan Lane after September 6). Primary Stages also premieres McNally's Deuce next March 20 to April 29.
