McNally, Terrence (1939-2020), was an American playwright who successfully wrote both regular plays and books for musicals. McNally’s works include light comedies, satires, and serious dramas about people trying to deal with the insecurities of life.
McNally first gained recognition with several short comic plays in the late 1960’s. His first successful full-length play was the farce The Ritz (1975), about a man trapped in a Turkish bath filled with strange characters. The more serious Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1988) portrays a woman who believes she is unattractive and cannot believe that a man loves her. In The Lisbon Traviata (1979), opera fans use their hobby as a way of avoiding real life. Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) shows a group of gay men coping with life during the AIDS epidemic. Master Class (1994) imagines opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her career.
McNally’s other plays include It’s Only a Play (1982, revised 2014); Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991); A Perfect Ganesh (1993); Corpus Christi (1998); two short plays performed under the title The Stendhal Syndrome (2004); Dedication, or The Stuff of Dreams (2005); Some Men and Deuce (both 2007), and Mothers and Sons (2014). He also wrote the scripts for the musicals The Rink (1984), Ragtime (1998), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1990), and The Full Monty (2000) and for the opera Dead Man Walking (2000).
McNally was born on Nov. 3, 1939, in St. Petersburg, Florida. He died on March 24, 2020, from complications of the respiratory disease COVID-19.
