An Interview with Terrence McNally

Tony Award winning playwright (Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class) and librettist (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime) Terrence McNally took time out one morning recently to speak with us before heading out to a rehearsal for a workshop of one of his latest projects, a new musical he’s writing with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman based on Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.

Some Men was a commission from the Sundance Institute “to write a play focusing on the themes of what it meant to be a gay American male in the last century.” Why did you choose to begin the play with a wedding?

I think that’s the most current issue and sort of where we are right now, but I don’t think the play is about marriage. It’s about how those seven or eight men got to that wedding—all the threads that led there. It’s not particularly a “pro-marriage” play because it’s a given in the play that same-sex marriages are celebrated. I wanted to trace the changes in gay life—the historical progression—and I think marriage was a very theatrical bookend. It’s something I’m in favor of, but it’s not a play about gay marriage.

It’s about how gays have reached that point in their self-acceptance, let alone society’s acceptance, that that is the kind of relationship they are willing to go to bat for, whereas, in the earlier scenes in the play the sex and the meetings are rather furtive and anonymous.

Was the play always so broad in scope, such a collage?
It was always that way from the very first draft. It always began and ended at the wedding of two people we never meet. And it was always multiple scenes—a non-linear play which is a real departure for me. The audience may have to wait until the final curtain to figure it all out, but it’s not a random assortment of scenes. Every scene in the play is related to someone at the wedding.

And I knew the big things I wanted to cover. The play has changed a lot—and, in a way, it hasn’t changed that much. I did a lot of re-writing and a lot of brand new scenes, but always in the same format. There was a scene always about gays in the military, for instance, but it went through many versions.

What happened to the women characters as the play progressed from the reading at Sundance to its world premiere at the Philadelphia Theatre Company and then on to Second Stage in NY last season?

You know, you just have one of those epiphanies. It goes without saying that they’re present as members of society, but to actually have the scenes, I was losing valuable dramatic time. The scene in the NY athletic club [replaced] a scene where a man confronted his wife about his sexuality and said he was leaving her. [In the new scene] I was able to talk about homophobia within the community itself. His lunch partner is the kind of man that was very prevalent at the time, gay men who did get married and maybe were heedless of the damage they were causing to their wives and children by not being honest about who they were. So I suddenly said, “Hey, it’s called ‘Some Men.’ I don’t need a couple of women in it to tell the story.” So those changes went into the next version—the definitive version—that was done in New York.

You and your partner Tom Kirdahy had a civil union ceremony in 2003 complete with an announcement in the NY Times Weddings/Celebrations” section. Did you do this to make a political statement?

We did, but it became very emotional once we got to Vermont and actually spoke the vows in public in front of a Justice of the Peace. It was at a small country inn and guests from the hotel started gathering around. By the time the little ceremony was over we had about twenty witnesses. It was very moving to stand there and repeat those vows publicly—utter those famous words which are very, very powerful. So our motive in going up was really to be another statistic, and we think it’s important to do things like that.

We did not go to Massachusetts, because Tom is an attorney and he has trouble with things that aren’t true. To get married in Massachusetts we would have had to sign a clause saying we intend to relocate and move there and that was not our intention. So he said this has the same legal weight as a marriage—though I prefer the word marriage, I suppose—and now New York State has just recognized our union as having the rights of a marriage.

So that’s why I say the play isn’t about the right to be married or the need for gay men and women to be able to get married, because I think that cause has really been won and it’s just a matter of time before all fifty states make it legal. I think it’s going to happen in my lifetime—and I’m 69 years old—so I don’t think it’s not enough of a cause to write a play about. I think that right has been won in people’s hearts and minds and it’s just a little more time before it’s in all the law books.

What else is on the horizon for you besides Catch Me If You Can?
I have a new play for next season called Unusual Acts of Devotion, which is on the front burner, and will probably premier in Philadelphia at PTC where I began Master Class and Some Men. And The Visit, which I did with Kander & Ebb just before 9/11 in Chicago at The Goodman Theatre, is going to be done at the Signature Theatre in Virginia [in May/June] with Chita Rivera and George Hearn. We hope it will have life in New York after that.

Suzanne Bixby