From a Washington Post obit, by Nelson Pressley, of playwright Terrence McNally:
Terrence McNally, a prolific, much-honored playwright who rose to the forefront of American theater with a humane and lyrical style in works such as “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class,” died March 24 at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. He was 81. . . .
His body of work comprised dozens of plays, nearly a dozen musicals and several operas. His modes ranged from anxious farces and social critiques in the 1960s and 1970s, when the gay-bathhouse romp “The Ritz” (1975) was his biggest hit, to the warmhearted “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1994), which illustrated the lives of eight gay men vacationing at a lake house. His “Corpus Christi,” which depicted a Jesus-like figure and his disciples as gay, ignited a firestorm in 1998. . . .
Mr. McNally, who became one of the country’s most produced and honored playwrights, spent the first half of his life struggling with alcohol and with the fact that others, even some of his lovers, did not accept that he was open with his sexuality while they were not.
One of his early romantic partners, playwright Edward Albee, whose 1962 drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was heralded as a masterpiece, played down his sexuality to avoid being labeled a “gay” playwright. . . .
His parents, both native New Yorkers, whetted his appetite for show business by taking him on trips to see legendary Broadway productions: “Annie Get Your Gun” starring Ethel Merman and “The King and I” with Gertrude Lawrence.
In his youth, he became enraptured by Maria Callas, whose voice he heard on the radio.
“I heard sympathetic vibrations. That’s the only way I can say it,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “That person is talking to me. That person has feelings I can get solace from. . . . Later, I learned about her tragic life, about the glamour, the gaining weight, the losing weight, the loss of her lover. But when I was 15 years old, I knew none of that. I only knew that it was something I liked.”. . .
Along with his successes, Mr. McNally was forced to confront his growing alcohol addiction. At a party in 1980 celebrating the 50th birthday of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, an intoxicated Mr. McNally spilled a drink on actress Lauren Bacall, who became irate.
Actress Angela Lansbury quietly confronted him about his drinking — an encounter that he said helped turn him around. . . .
“I had a very strong desire to make myself heard,” he wrote in the 2015 collection “Selected Works: A Memoir in Plays.” “I would become a writer to accomplish this. If there were alternatives, they never occurred to me.”
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