Terrence McNally
A Perfect Ganesh by Terrence McNally
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
The World According to Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally wrote his first play at the age of fourteen, an imaginary biography of George Gershwin. Now, some forty years on and with roughly that many professional productions to his credit including television scripts, two screenplays and a Tony Award-winning musical book, he has been called the hottest American playwright of the 1990s and the most popular mainstream playwright after Neil Simon. Yet for all his success he remains modest about his achievement: “You learn there’s nothing precious about writing,” he said once. “It’s a job like any other.”
He was born fifty-something years ago in the Texas town of Corpus Christi, and his early influences were distinctly high-brow. Every Saturday afternoon, while his parents sat in the car listening to the ball game, the young McNally would be glued to the opera broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, moving characters around a miniature version of the stage he’d put together from pictures in Opera News. “It was a finite world you could control,” he recalls, and a world that continues to claim a good deal of his time and interest; he still broadcasts regularly on opera in New York.
He was one of the first from his high school to go east to college, with a scholarship to Columbia, and he spent weeks of evenings watching shows on Broadway. Catholic in his tastes, he devoured everything from musicals to Tennessee Williams. In the end the stage exercised so strong a pull that his original intention to be a journalist went by the board. “The opera, the theatre – I had to make these things come true for me.” His first mature effort, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, flopped on Broadway, but a Guggenheim fellowship allowed him the time to concentrate on writing and Next, a one-act play about an unfit man reporting for an army medical, was an off-Broadway success. He has been a professional playwright ever since and, although there have been some very lean times, he is now reaping the rewards of his persistence. He is grateful he has never had to resort to magazine work or episodic television for his daily bread.
Not that it has all been plain sailing. An early comedy, Broadway Broadway, fell dead before it even reached New York, and its failure put him off writing for several years. But once rewritten as It’s Only a Play, its production at the Manhattan Theatre Club revived his fortunes and his confidence. In the years since, many plays have premiered at that theatre, including Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata and Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune.
McNally is consistently generous in acknowledging those who inspired and guided him in his formative years. He remembers in particular a nun who would play Puccini duets to her sixth-graders, and an English teacher in high school, Maureen McElroy, whose influence was so powerful and long-lasting that years later he dedicated a play to her and they are still in touch. He also acknowledges a debt to writer and comedienne Elaine May who directed his second play and who, incidentally, used to do a cabaret act with Mike Nichols, often improvised, along the lines of Eleanor Bron and John Fortune in this country. He says you don’t have to be tough to survive in the business, but you do need to work with people on the same wavelength.
It is perhaps for this reason that he tends to write a lot for a small family of actors he has come to know and trust. His monologue Master Class, based on the life of Maria Callas, was written for the actress Zoe Caldwell (who also took the role of Katharine Brynne when A Perfect Ganesh opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club). Although the actress won rave reviews for her performance as the demanding diva, some critics were less gushing about the play itself, claiming the playwright’s passion for his subject has prevented him viewing his material with the necessary objectivity.
It is true McNally is obviously and avowedly besotted with the singer. In 1956 he waited in line for three days to buy a ticket for her Met debut in Norma, and Master Class was not the first time he had attempted to created her presence on stage – The Lisbon Traviata featured her in a play described by McNally himself as “an opera buffa that ends up as verismo tragedy”. But if there are technical problems in Master Class then Terrence McNally is the man to fix them. He is famous in the business for having ‘rescued’ the book of the stage musical Kiss of the Spider Woman after it had received some of the most vitriolic reviews in the history of the American stage.
Although certain ideas and themes keep recurring through the natural interests and psyche of the writer, his plays as a whole are varied in their themes and approach. Fellow playwright Wendy Wasserstein, a close friend, says of his body of work that he “culls from many sources, from the comedic in a very Terrence way to Tennessee Williams to a sort of mysticism. And there is an innate theatricality to it”. A Perfect Ganesh is certainly very different in both style and theme from, say, Love! Valour! Compassion!, in which eight gay men meet over a series of summer holiday weekends, or Lips Together, Teeth Apart, a waspish battle of the sexes nineties-style set in a trendy beach house in Fire Island, New York.
Common to most are the pains of modern life, which include inevitably perhaps stress, loneliness and spiritual emptiness, but increasingly in this day and age the issues of racism, AIDS and homophobia. Part of life, these themes can hardly be ignored by any self-respecting playwright, but for McNally they remain themes and not subjects. “I’m more interested in what links us as human beings rather than what separates us.” A Perfect Ganesh is a case in point – metaphysical, even philosophical, touching and funny: a classic Terrence McNally mix.
The story was inspired by two American women he met by chance on a train travelling through Rajasthan ten years ago, and the play contains all the elements that his work is famous for. But the playwright does not stand on a soapbox. At least, not anymore he doesn’t. Once he was consciously a critic of the feel-good generation, of characters who sought escape or respite from suffering. But now he feels his work has moved on. “In my earlier work I was very much the star of my plays. The author’s voice is everywhere… Now I like to think I am less a character and less controlling of my characters’ lives and destinies.” Age has also helped the mellowing process. “Maturity makes us less judgemental of other, more tolerant. My work is more compassionate. I don’t make fun of people now…” although he recently confessed that he was surprised to find how “emotionally autobiographical” his plays are.
This essentially humane, tolerant and frankly generous view of human nature extends to the rehearsal process. “Go ahead and do what you think works best for your people and your space,” he encouraged the director of the American production of A Perfect Ganesh. In other words, allow, accept, be. This seems to be a philosophy central not just to McNally’s works but also to his own world view. “There’s divinity in everybody,” he says. “The play tries to deal with the presence of God in our lives – and the acceptance of life in all its horror and radiance.”
As for the man himself, he is comfortable with himself and his life. He is clear about who he likes and who he doesn’t, and high up on the list of the latter are bullies of any description. “I try to spend my life with my peers, not my inferiors, or people who think they’re my superiors.” He continues to live and work in New York because of the experience it affords him – the buzz of stress and being able to observe people coping – or failing to cope – with their lives. The big city also offers him the cultural stimulation he needs from art galleries to dance and ballet, which he finds particularly useful in teaching him about character: “Dance resolves how you get from this pose to the next pose. You have to make these transitions.”
His work as a whole is just one writer’s attempt to make sense of existence. “That’s what I think art is – an interpretation of our world. If we’re successful, more people will identify with our work than not.”
(Terrence McNally passed away in Florida on 24 March 2020 at the age of 81.)
