Dedicated to the Theater

His first Broadway play opened to unanimously negative reviews and lasted only 13 performances. His second effort lasted a little longer — 16 performances — but received even worse reviews. After an ignominious start like that, who would have expected that, 40 years later, Terrence McNally would still be writing plays that would be produced and hotly anticipated?

His aforementioned first play was actually an adaptation of an adaptation: The Lady of the Camellias, the well-known 1848 work by Alexandre Dumas fils, was first adapted for the stage by the British playwright Giles Cooper. On March 20, 1963, McNally’s version opened at the Winter Garden and shuttered there 10 days later. Of course, an adaptation doesn’t quite let us know exactly what’s on a playwright’s mind, and Broadway had to wait two years for McNally to show us.

And Things That Go Bump in the Night opened on April 26, 1965. That McNally could leave the house and face the world on April 27, 1965 showed great courage. Six blistering pans from the six daily newspapers greeted the play, which featured an overtly gay character (unheard of at the time) who joins his family in a fallout shelter. But lead producer Theodore Mann noticed that he hadn’t used up all of his budget, so he decided to spend the money by offering theatergoers tickets for a dollar. That 85% discount caused the show to sell out the rest of the week, so Mann splurged for one more week, though he did make Friday and Saturday theatergoers pay $2. The show still sold out.

Some years ago, I brought up the $1 ticket story to McNally, who told me that he might not be the playwright he is today had Mann not thus experimented. McNally explained that, by attending all subsequent performances of And Things That Go Bump in the Night, he was able to notice when the audience was with him and when it wasn’t. Hearing a packed house feel alienated in the same spots each night made him understand what the public would bear and which sections of the script could have used some rewriting. He also saw one theatergoer jump onto the stage and try to get Eileen Heckart off of it, prompting director Robert Drivas to grapple with him. (The man felt that the play was filthy and that such a distinguished actress as Heckart shouldn’t be doing it.)

Maybe McNally just needed to be Off-Broadway; his next play, Sweet Eros, opened there. It was the first play to offer a completely nude woman. Granted, she was tied to a chair with her back to the audience, but the kinkiness factor did make this an event. Sweet Eros was a one-act paired with another, Witness, which featured James Coco, who’d been buzzing around for a while but had never gotten a break. McNally soon gave him one by writing a play for him: Next, in which Coco portrayed a middle-aged man who was summoned to see the draft board by mistake and then was caught up in roll after roll of red tape. Next, paired with Elaine May’s Adaptation, was an Off-Broadway smash, playing more than 700 performances. (McNally can take credit for jump-starting Coco’s career; Neil Simon came to see Next and immediately began writing The Last of the Red-Hot Lovers for the actor.)

McNally’s 1975 Broadway hit The Ritz is set in a pre-AIDS gay bathhouse. One can imagine McNally visiting such an establishment, noticing all the slamming doors, thinking, “This is a Feydeau farce,” then rushing home and writing one. Over the past 30 years, I have participated in many a discussion whose subject has been, “What’s your favorite line from The Ritz?” Sometimes I quote “Dumb and dizzy, that’s me, darlin’ ” (which McNally recycled for Kiss of the Spider Woman). Rent or buy the film and you’ll see a pre-Oscar F. Murray Abraham bump his hip against a decidedly un-hip Jerry Stiller while saying this line; you may find yourself roaring with laughter. You might also enjoy my other favorite line, which comes when the owner of the bathhouse is checking in a guest and inquires about the duration of his visit. “How long?” he asks — to which Treat Williams responds in a panicked voice, “Is what?”

The laughter subsided in 1978, when McNally experienced an out-of-town closing with Broadway! Broadway! — a show whose demise had much to do with the terminal illness of its star, Lenny Baker. But even that play has had a subsequent life under the new title It’s Only a Play. It has had at least three productions in New York, including one in the recent Midtown International Theatre Festival. The action takes place at the opening night party of a new show, starting with a person who’s seen the premiere sneaking into an upstairs bedroom and calling a friend to say how awful the show was. This scene always makes me laugh because I’ve received — and made –thousands of such phone calls over the years.

In 1992, McNally won the Lucille Lortel Award for “Outstanding Body of Work.” Why not? There’d been Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, The Lisbon Traviata, and Lips Together, Teeth Apart, in addition to all the others. But who knew that his biggest successes were yet to come? He would win two Best Play Tony Awards in the 1990s for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, and two more Tonys that same decade for his books for the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. (His book for The Full Monty might also have won if the show had opened during a season that wasn’t filled with hysteria over The Producers.)

Moreover, McNally has provided Tony-winning roles for performers in seven of the eight acting categories. True, no McNally leading man has ever been named Best Actor in a Play; Nathan Lane wasn’t even nominated for Love! Valour! Compassion!, though Stanley Tucci was for the revival of Frankie and Johnny. But there have been wins by Zoe Caldwell for Best Actress in a Play (Master Class); John Glover for Best Featured Actor in a Play (Love! Valour! Compassion!); Rita Moreno for Best Featured Actress in a Play (The Ritz — which made her the first person to win a clean sweep of the Tony, Oscar, Emmy and Grammy); Brent Carver for Best Actor in a Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman); Chita Rivera, twice, for Best Actress in a Musical (The Rink and Kiss, which may be why McNally’s currently writing the book for her autobiographical show Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life); Anthony Crivello for Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Kiss); and Audra McDonald for both Best Featured Actress in a Play and a Musical (Master Class and Ragtime respectively.)

I thought of all this the other night during the intermission of McNally’s newest play, Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, at Primary Stages. Well, maybe it’s not his newest; the play was supposed to open the renovated Biltmore Theatre in 2002, and I can now say that Lynne Meadow erred in going with The Violet Hour instead. Nothing against that Richard Greenberg script, but McNally wrote a play about a decrepit theater that could be restored to its former glory — precisely the story of the Biltmore, which had been shuttered and rotting for 15 years. In the play, Lou Nuncle is a children’s theater producer-actor-director-toilet cleaner whose girlfriend/right-hand woman Jessie gets him a look at an old playhouse. “A real showplace,” he says in awe. “The workmanship. The detail. The molding. The stucco work.” Adds Jessie, “You’re always saying they don’t build places like this anymore.” Just like the Biltmore.

God bless Primary Stages for bringing us the play, in a fabulous production directed by Michael Morris. Nathan Lane is wonderfully subdued as Lou, Alison Fraser ages herself terrifically as the careworn Jessie, and Marian Seldes has never been better (just think what that means!) as the theater owner who, like so much of the rest of the world, doesn’t give a damn about theater. The author is sometimes sentimental, but mostly isn’t, in creating a play about our favorite medium’s chances of survival. Who should know better than he? Terrence McNally has shown admirable resiliency and dedication throughout his 40-year career.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]