Love! Valour! McNally!

by Loren King

Terrence McNally

Speakeasy Stage Company honors the playwright it loves — and produces — the most, Terrence McNally

As the most-produced playwright in Speakeasy Stage Company’s 20-year history, it’s fitting that Terrence McNally will join Speakeasy founder and artistic director Paul Daigneault as the honorees for Speakeasy’s benefit gala and auction, Men of Great Importance on April 4.

Speakeasy has staged five McNally works over the past two decades, beginning with Lips Together, Teeth Apart and Love! Valour! Compassion!, both during 1996; A Man of No Importance, a co-production with the Súgán Theatre Company in 2003; the Tony Award-winner Kiss of the Spiderwoman in 2005; and Some Men in 2008. Daigneault directed all except Lips Together, Teeth Apart, which was helmed by Richard Carey. McNally attended some of these performances and engaged in talkbacks with audiences.

“I’m looking forward to the event, and I plan to enjoy myself,” said McNally from the New York home he shares with Thomas Kirdahy, his partner of ten years (the couple were married in Washington D.C. last year). “I love Boston. We try to visit at least once a year.” 

McNally will attend the fundraiser even though his latest work, the musical Catch Me if You Can, is slated to open on Broadway April 10. Based on the Steven Spielberg film, it’s the much-anticipated new show from the Hairspray team of composer Marc Shaiman, lyricist Scott Wittman, director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell. Norbert Leo Butz and Aaron Tveit star as the real-life con man Frank Abagnale Jr., and the F.B.I. agent who pursues him. 

McNally says his book for the show focuses on the “symbiotic relationship between the two men, and also expands the roles of Frank’s father and mother.”

Besides his status as one of America’s leading dramatists, McNally, 71, is a seminal figure in modern gay culture. Out for his entire career — when he first arrived in New York, he was a protégé and lover of Edward Albee — McNally’s plays have consistently presented complex gay characters and gay themes to audiences. Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) offered a study of the irrational fears that many people harbor towards gays and those living with AIDS. Three years later, McNally continued to explore the effect of AIDS on a group of eight gay friends in Love! Valour! Compassion! He stirred the wrath of the Right in 1997 with Corpus Christi, a re-imagining of Jesus and his disciples as gay men living in modern day Texas (where McNally grew up). The Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), after initially canceling its production due to threats, opened Corpus Christi to a storm of protests including death threats to McNally.

The MTC in June will stage one of McNally’s signature plays, the Tony Award-winning Master Class starring Tyne Daly as legendary opera star Maria Callas. “I’m thrilled; she’s a real, no nonsense, take-no-prisoners actress,” says McNally. 

Daly performed the role last year at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ festival of three McNally plays that dramatize his passion for opera. Terrence McNally’s Nights at the Opera presented, besides Master Class, The Lisbon Traviata, the 1985 play that began McNally’s long working relationship with actor Nathan Lane, and McNally’s new play, The Golden Age. Set backstage at an Italian opera house in the mid-19th century, it will open on Broadway in the fall.

Before agreeing to write Catch Me if You Can, McNally said he passed on a number of other projects “that didn’t have enough story, or just were not right to sustain me for the three years on average that it takes” to bring a show to fruition. Catch Me if You Can took six years to arrive on Broadway but “I had a ball writing it,” said McNally. “You just do the work. You keep your nose to the grindstone and hope for the best.”

Men of Great Importance takes place Monday, April 4, 6 to 9 p.m. at Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel, 606 Congress Street, Boston. For more information, visit www.speakeasystage.com.