Category Archives: Terrence McNally

Terrence McNally Spoke A Truth No One Wanted To Hear

Perhaps the most important moment of The Tony Awards occurred when Terrence McNally received his lifetime achievement award. No one wanted to hear him. His infirmity cut into time for commercials, but he reminded us that the theatre has always been a place for rebels, outcasts, and truth-seekers. “The world needs artists more than ever to remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are,” he stated.

Follow this link to see his whole speech: https://www.broadwayworld.com/videoplay/VIDEO-Legendary-Playwright-Librettist-Terrence-McNally-Accepted-his-2019-Lifetime-Achievement-Award-at-the-Tony-Awards-20190609

Mothers, Sons, and the Passing of the Torch

My old playwriting professor, Howard Stein, used to say, when evaluating students’ work offered up in class, “You’re hiding! You’re hiding!” This critique was often given to young writers who often danced around what their plays wanted to be and should have been about. I have a feeling that Professor Stein would have said much the same to Terrence McNally after reading his Mothers and Sons.

To be fair to McNally, he has good reason to avoid the heart of his drama. In short, the play concerns Cal Porter (Bill Mootos), who survived the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and early 1990’s but who also lost his lover, Andre, of the time. It is a sequel of sorts to McNally’s television play Andre’s Mother; it also converses with the AIDS plays of the 1980’s such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. That mother, Katharine Gerard (Annette Miller), returns to New York City to return Andre’s diary to Cal. Cal is a survivor, and, Mothers and Sons is as much about surviving catastrophic circumstances as are David Rabe’s loose trilogy on the Vietnam War. But McNally keeps steering away from the beating heart of his play, from the trauma of his characters’ past as well as his own.

Much of the early portion of this play trades in strained humor about the minutiae of  Manhattan upper-middle-class life (e.g. what those on the West Side versus East Side refer to as “The Met”). McNally, like 1990’s era Woody Allen, name checks bourgeois cultural touchstones without really delving into them in any meaningful way. Cal has moved on. He is now has a husband – Will Ogden (David Gow) – and a son – Bud (in my performance, Evan Miller). While he has moved on, life has conspired to chain Katharine to the past. He offers a potent set-up for an explosive drama, but the playwright keeps sidestepping it with heavy-handed maneuvering of the cast to switch move individuals on and off-stage so we are constantly mired in more comedic two-hander scenes instead of more dramatic three-handers.

However, the pain that McNally wants paradoxically both explore and avoid lurks just beneath the surface. The responsibility of any production of this work is to allow that pain to slip through the cracks, to transcend from sub-text to text, and rampage across the playing space. I am happy to report that the production at Shakespeare & Company under the direction of James Warwick let’s that pain out of the cage and rampage across the stage. Though he must bend to the sentimentalization of the play (an unearned family portrait at the coda), he mines the tragedy for the maximum impact on the audience.

Mootos and Miller in their early scenes frequently devolve into mannered performances as they struggle with one of the play’s main structural issues: why does Katharine not leave? But once the comedy of manners is put aside in favor of the conflict over Andre’s legacy, they find their voice and stride. The rawness that characterized McNally’s work when he was a protege of Albee is cathartic. Gow expertly marries civility with rage as he must t negotiate with the continuing shockwaves from the death of someone he has never met. A recent graduate of the School of Arts from the University of North Carolina, Gow is on his way to becoming one of our leading interpreters of McNally having starred in the title role in a New York revival of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? this past winter. Through sheer force of charisma, Evan Miller as Bud built an island of calm in an otherwise stormy night of the theatre. Set designer Patrick Brennan ably recreates a West Side apartment in winter for the Berkshires in the summer.

In short, this a flawed but important play that benefits from a superlative production. It serves as a strong lead-in for Shakespeare & Company’s production of Taylor Mac’s Hir.

Fire and Air Neither Burns Nor Soars

It was written by a playwright of extraordinary gifts. Its director has a track record of creating magical moments on stage. It has an impeccable cast. It has a fascinating subject. Yet, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. And what should have been a compelling evening of theatre rarely engages the attention of its audience.

Terrence McNally’s Fire and Air, currently playing at the Classic Stage Company, should have entranced its audience with an urgent tale of the power and necessity of art. Centering on the Ballets Russe and its impresario Sergei Diaghilev (David Hodge) as the company and leader strove to create new, dangerous, and innovative performances in the Modernist vein in the crucible of war-torn and revolution-torn Europe of the early twentieth century. It is a drama rife with possibilities. But McNally – who has effectively dramatized the power of opera in Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata – fails to make the third time to charm with the ballet. The production moves quickly through the years with little context or sense of how the cataclysmic events of the time are impacting the art.

The intended portrait of Diaghilev as visionary and genius fails to connect. We are told that he is  brilliant, but we are never shown that he is. He comes across as a child, alternating between fits of privilege or fear, rather than as someone who grasps the elemental potential of dance. His sexual domination in the first act of Nijinsky (James Cusatsi-Moyer) and in the second act of Massine (Jay Armstrong Johnson) communicates not so much as the idiosyncratic but ultimately benign behavior of a mentor and genius, but, in this age of #metoo, but as abusive practices that remind one far too much of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. We recoil, especially as Nijinsky seems (it is really not clear) to have spiraled into madness.

The cast is game, but they are given little to do. Veteran thespians John Glover, Marsha Mason, and Marin Mazzie round out the supporting cast, but they have little impact upon the narrative momentum of the show. They observe, comment, and support Diaghilev (though, again, it is unclear as to why). The night I attended, Mazzie’s role (Misia) was performed by an understudy. Usually, that is a source of disappointment, but I do not think Mazzie would have impacted the play any more than Glover or Mason did. Hodge, the night I attended, struggled with his diction, and that was not conducive providing clarity for what was already a muddle.

The two younger performers fared better. Cusatsi-Moyer has a magnetic presence, but he seemed to be constrained by writing that demanded he only serve as enigmatic temptation. There seemed to be a fuller three-dimensional life going on behind his eyes, and it would have benefitted the production if he had been given free reign to explore that. Johnson constantly offered much-needed vitality with fresh and original choices that gave him more nuance than perhaps was intended for the boy toy du jour role.

At the end of the day, all of the talent on stage and in the production could not animate what should have been an extraordinary theatrical event.

So Holden Caulfield Made It To Adulthood. Now What?

Because of the complications of copyright, we may never see a living embodiment of Holden Caulfield on either stage or screen. Terrence McNally, however, offered us the next best thing with Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?, a work that premiered in 1971 at the Yale Rep. It combines autobiographical elements with a not-so-subtextual musing of what Holden Caulfield would have been like if he had made it to adulthood and the 1960’s. Indeed, the narrative movement conforms much to the original novel’s: a journey to New York City (this time on a plane instead of a train), a disastrous dalliance in a hotel, an ambivalent relationship with an older brother, a nervous breakdown in the rain. Now, though, the rebel without a cause suddenly has a cause.

There are some dated elements to McNally’s script (a starchy female customer at Bloomingdale’s for instance), but much of it remains surprisingly relevant in part because the playwright did not construct a realistic work. It is more of a meditation on the 1960’s counter-culture movement and its relationship to its roots in the 1950’s. In pushing his Holden-like character forward, McNally also does the same with other 1950’s icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Tommy himself embodies both the positive and negative of that counter-culture movement (in 1971 the country found itself in a pretty dark place and elements of the peace movement turned to violence for political purpose). One can hear echoes of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he reflects, “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” The play and character walk the razor’s edge between the wave and the place where it broke, between Woodstock and Altamont.

It is in that ambiguity that the plays finds its resonance, particularly a year into the Trump Era. In a time when the old idealism is lost, when a sense of loss and abandonment is profound, and when desperation builds to an overwhelming force, it requires no great act of imagination what troubling path some might choose.

Of course, what is needed to convey this 1971 work in 2017 is a creative team that can navigate its extremely treacherous currents. Fortunately, Starting 5 Productions has done just that. Director Laura Braza and her design team have just done that. Scene designer Zach Serafin constructed one of the better sets I have seen on an off-off-Broadway budget that both tells the (expressionistic) story and conveys a certain beauty of the underground in its own right. Braza, further, keeps the the production moving at pace without sacrificing emotional depth.

The ensemble moves seamlessly from the ridiculous to the realistic. Emily Kitchens, playing numerous roles, does a hilarious job as an oblivious Pat Nixon. Portraying Ben Delight, Daniel O’Shea finds nuance in the role of the gentleman beggar. Emma Geer infuses Nedda Lemon with a melancholy that informs even her happier moments. When she admits to her deep unhappiness in her final scene with Tommy, we can just hear her heart break.

The lynchpin of all of this is Tommy, played by the exceptional David Gow. Gow does not so much embody the role as devour it. The danger of Holden or Tommy is that either could easily be reduced to a sociopath. The necessary approach, therefore, is to embrace the damaged child  that is Tommy, that he has been damaged by the family, nation, world, and his own dreams. Gow pulls back from the bombast and hubris that often colored individuals from the counter-culture and instead fills his Tommy with vulnerability and despair. Even as he sits in the airplane drinking champagne looking across at America, an elegiac note sounds in his voice. When in the play’s coda, he loses everyone, we know, from Gow’s careful construction, that these are in fact losses that he cannot bare (despite his seeming bravado to the contrary). Yet, he finds puckish fun in the more surreal elements; he offers a vaudevillian physical battle with Mrs. Nixon as a blind handicapped girl at a photo op, a dead-on parody of James Dean, and a wonderfully demented performance as a Trotskyite Marilyn Monroe. This last left parody behind in the rear-view window and entered the realm of the sublime. Throughout, Gow finds the humanity that underscores all the character’s actions, and thus finds the tragic in the play’s final moments.

Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? performs through December 17. More information can be found here: https://wherehastommyflowersgone.weebly.com