Terrence McNally, 81, Invited America Into The Gay Life

The playwright Terrence McNally, who died on March 24 at age 81, had long lived in Water Mill, but his connection to nearby Sag Harbor began many years earlier, thanks to another much-honored writer, John Steinbeck.

In the summer of 1961, the author of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden,” one year shy of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, had just published “The Winter of Our Discontent,” set in a slightly fictionalized Sag Harbor, and was finishing “Travels with Charley.”

Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, decided to take a trip to Europe with his two sons, John IV and Thom. He wrote to a friend, “We engaged a young but very good tutor and the five of us plan to wander around the world, taking about a year to do it.”

That new fifth member of the Steinbeck family was the 22-year-old Mr. McNally, who at the time was a student at the Actors Studio in Manhattan.

In his biography of John Steinbeck, Jackson J. Benson reports that the prospective tutor “went through a difficult interview, as John asked questions, mumbled through his underbite, that McNally could barely understand,” especially when Steinbeck switched to French.

“Since the five of them would be spending a lot of time together, McNally was brought to Sag Harbor nearly every weekend that summer just ‘to see,’ as Elaine put it, ‘how we all felt about one another.’”

They must have all felt fine enough, because the Steinbecks and their young tutor began their odyssey by touring the British Isles by station wagon. They continued on to France, Italy and Greece.

One result of the lengthy sojourn in Europe was Mr. McNally forming a friendship with the Steinbecks that would endure for decades.

Mr. McNally died last week at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida, of complications of the novel coronavirus. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had overcome lung cancer, thus making him vulnerable to the virus’s effects.

Mr. McNally’s connection to Steinbeck and Sag Harbor was only a prelude to his own brilliant career as a writer. That career includes four Tony Awards and his “outpouring of work for the theater [that] dramatized and domesticated gay life across five decades,” according to The New York Times. His fourth Tony, awarded last year, was bestowed for lifetime achievement.

Michael Terrence McNally was born on November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida. After his family moved to Port Chester, New York, he was often taken to the theater by his paternal grandfather. One of the first productions he saw was the musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” starring Ethel Merman, which made a big impression on the youngster.

However, the McNallys’ stay in the New York area was short-lived. They moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he attended high school and served as editor of the school’s newspaper and literary magazine. He credited a teacher there for reawakening a love of the theater.

Mr. McNally returned to New York to attend Columbia University. The first Broadway production he saw at that time was “Damn Yankees,” starring Gwen Verdon.

Soon after graduation in 1960, he began a relationship with the future Montauk resident Edward Albee, who was just getting his plays produced in New York — the one-act “The Zoo Story” had premiered Off-Broadway that year. The relationship lasted for five years, during which time Mr. Albee became one of the leading playwrights of his generation, capped by the much-honored “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Mr. McNally’s early plays to be produced were “Morning, Noon and Night” in 1968, and two one-acts under the title “Bad Habits” in 1974. The following year, he achieved success with “The Ritz,” and he continued to earn acclaim and awards for writing both dramas and musicals, including “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” in 1982, “The Lisbon Traviata” in 1989, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” in 1991, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1993, “Love! Valour! Compassion!” in 1995, “Master Class” in 1996, “Ragtime” in 1998, and “Mothers and Sons” in 2014.

His more well-known plays have been revived Off- and on Broadway many times, one example being last year’s highly praised production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.

The Times said: “Though the changes Mr. McNally wrote about were epochal for gay men, his plays were designed not to exclude. However furious, they are also ingratiating, emphasizing familiar situations, comic personalities and well-turned put-downs. His gay stories never came across as a narrowing of theater’s human focus but as an expansion of it, and by inviting everyone into them he helped solidify the social change he was describing.”

The mantle above Mr. McNally’s fireplace must have been quite crowded. In addition to the four Tony Awards, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996; he received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011; he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States, in 2018; and he received four Drama Desk Awards and an Emmy Award, among other accolades.

In Water Mill, McNally lived with Tom Kirdahy, who is both an attorney and a Tony Award-winning producer. The two met in June 2001 at an event at Guild Hall in East Hampton sponsored by the East End Gay Organization, which included a panel discussion featuring Mr. McNally with Mr. Albee and the Sag Harbor resident Lanford Wilson.

Mr. McNally and Mr. Kirdahy were joined in a civil union two years later and were married in 2010.

Over the years, Mr. McNally was a familiar presence socially and artistically on the South Fork.

“Terrence McNally was an important part of our theatrical community,” said Paul Davis of Sag Harbor, an artist and theatrical poster designer whose work with the Public Theater in New York is particularly well-known. “He was charming, witty and modest, and it was always a pleasure to see his work and be in his company. I will miss him.”

Locally, Mr. McNally was mostly associated with the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where he was a longtime Artistic Associate. According to Emma Walton Hamilton and Steve Hamilton, who with Sybil Christopher founded the theater, “Beyond his exceptional talent and industry, Terrence was, above all, a gentleman. He was a constant source of inspiration to us, in that he was kind, generous and real. Terrence was a true champion of the arts in every sense."

Mr. McNally did more than donate to and attend events at Bay Street. In 1995, his collaboration with Joe Pintauro and Lanford Wilson, “By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea,” had its world premiere at the theater. Another collaboration with a Sag Harbor playwright, a play with Jon Robin Baitz titled “House,” made its debut at Bay Street in 1998 and starred Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason.

And that same year, in what was a coming-full-circle moment, Mr. McNally was one of the celebrants when the stage of the Bay Street Theatre was named after Elaine Steinbeck — 37 years after he had first set foot in Sag Harbor to take on a tutor position.