Selected Works: A Memoir in Plays

In the new collection "Selected Works: A Memoir in Plays," Terrence McNally says the best advice he can give a new playwright, aside from knowing Shakespeare and Chekhov, is "to read Moss Hart's 'Act One' and decide for yourself if you want to spend the rest of your life collaborating with actors, directors, designers and producers."

This is fitting because the personal essays that introduce this selection of eight plays, which the author has chosen to be the most revealing in his oeuvre, paint the importance of the American theatre in the same golden light as Hart's nostalgic autobiography -- only this volume lets the dramas themselves do most of the talking.

Not only is McNally one of the most popular writers currently working in the American theatre, he stands apart from his contemporaries in the way that he has never shied away from looking directly into gay people's lives and chronicling their experience.

The moments in McNally's plays seem so ordinary and lifelike: The way Johnny chops onions and makes an omelet in "Frankie and Johnnny in the Clair de Lune" or the way Perry trims the hair in Arthur's ears in "Love! Valor! Compassion!" Nevertheless, these plays resound with grand arias of emotion that go unrevealed in the everyday.

The plays McNally has chosen for this hardbound volume do not span the author's career. He has chosen to collect some of his more mature and nuanced work here. These are straight dramas, rather than any of the books he has written for musicals. And he includes the Tony-nominated "Mothers and Sons" as well as the critically acclaimed "And Away We Go," which have never been previously published.

McNally started out as a more overtly comic writer, and his comedy was necessarily didactic. As a writer ahead of his time when it came to social issues and civil rights, this was an appropriate tone.

As welcoming as we may consider the theatre to be to gay people, McNally recalls, "playwrights kept gay plot lines and characters off the stage and their sexuality to themselves." The major arts institutions of New York "did not want unmarried men (let alone women!) running them." And the attitudes of the time were reflected by the critics. Take for instance John Simon who said of McNally's "And Things That Go Bump in the Night," "Wilde's love that dared not speak its name, now won't shut up."

By the time McNally penned the plays in this volume the writer and the culture had evolved to the point that he could invisibly assess social situations and the people in them, letting "the audience decide who is 'good,' and who is 'bad,' and who is merely human."

With each introduction, McNally draws from his experience to help interpreters better perform his plays, but he also gives the reader a slightly romantic, and certainly poetic, glimpse into his own life.

"Selected Works: A Memoir in Plays"
By Terrence McNally
"Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," "The Lisbon Traviata," "Lips Together, Teeth Apart," "A Perfect Ganesh," "Love! Valor! Compassion!" "Master Class," "And Away We Go" and "Mothers and Sons."
Grove Press; August 4, 2015
$35 hardcover
groveatlantic.com