Terrence McNally at Seattle Arts and Lectures

by Ann Reckner

Playwright Terrence McNally didn’t fill the seats the way Oliver Sacks did at the previous Seattle Arts & Lectures event on December 1, which is too bad, because McNally showed a gift for public speaking. McNally, author of the Tony Award-winning plays Love! Valor! Compassion! and Master Class, among many other works, put on an astonishingly sustained verbal show. The 65-year-old playwright spoke for an hour with hardly a pause for breath, and managed to make most of his thoughts hang together. Maybe it’s a canned speech that he’s given dozens of times, but it was still impressive—the man has the actor’s gift as well as the writer’s. Without a lectern, he paced the length of the stage with his black leather jacket and silver hair shining under the lights at Benaroya.

Most fascinating were McNally’s anecdotes about how he became a writer. Whether talking about lessons learned from a grade school teacher—who, after reading one of McNally’s short stories in which a character drank a martini with a maraschino cherry in it, advised him to write what he knew—or the fortune of time and place, coming to New York City in the 1950s when a young writer could rent an apartment for $45 a month, McNally graciously admitted there has been an element of luck to his success. Another example: When looking for a job after college, an acquaintance asked McNally if he would be interested in working as a tutor for a family taking a year-long trip around the world. McNally was handed a card bearing the name "John Steinbeck." Yes, that John Steinbeck. And yes, he took the job.

McNally was visibly moved as he described the way people all over the world, in small towns and big cities, approached John Steinbeck with well-loved copies of his novels for him to sign. McNally’s travels with Steinbeck showed him how art could transcend time, culture, and geography. In McNally’s view, the story of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has endured because it is real, because Steinbeck had known people like the Joads and had written what he knew.

McNally proposed that it is much more difficult today for artists to remain true to themselves than it was 30, 20, even 10 years ago. In the theater, the ascendance of the blockbuster musical has pushed smaller, more difficult works off Broadway, and inflated ticket prices to such a height that it discourages the average person from going to live theater at all. He noted that he can no longer get his plays produced on Broadway. (Although he has remained involved with the Great White Way through such projects as writing the book for the musical version of The Full Monty which ran on Broadway from 2000 to 2002.)

And even an established writer like McNally sometimes needs help getting his more "difficult" works produced at all, on or off Broadway. McNally devoted part of his lecture to the story of how in 1998, a newspaper columnist maliciously and wrongly reported that McNally’s new play Corpus Christi showed Jesus and the apostles, who are depicted in the play as gay men, performing sex acts on stage. The off-Broadway theater premiering the play received bomb threats and had conservative religious demonstrators on its doorstep day and night. When the theater buckled to the pressure and decided to cancel the play, South African playwright Athol Fugard came to the rescue, saying that unless McNally’s play went on as planned, Fugard would pull his play, slated to appear next. The theater reversed its decision, and McNally’s play went on, albeit with police officers stationed throughout the theater in case of violence. In one of the most powerful moments of the lecture, McNally declared his belief "It is my right to cast Jesus in my own image, that of a gay man," to many cheers from the audience.

As is so often the case with these sorts of events in Seattle, McNally was preaching to the choir. You know what the applause lines are going to be: corporatization is killing the arts; your new public library is wonderful; I have the right to portray Jesus as a gay man... While McNally may not have given the general audience much to chew on—more leaving them to bask in their reflected liberal glory — as a writer I was inspired by the playwright’s journey, from a small boy in Corpus Christi, Texas, who listened, rapt, to the opera music that his teacher played, and imagined a far-off world in which people drank cocktails with maraschino cherries.

Ann Reckner has also written for WGBH’s Website and Experience magazine. During the day, she works as a proofreader at a Seattle advertising agency.