Playwright Terrence McNally Dies Of Complications Due To Coronavirus

Deadline ^ | 3/24/20

[easternsky]

Thanks for info

[lepton]

After A “Re-Evaluation” Researchers Determined “Only 12% Of Death Certificates (in Italy) Have Shown A Direct Causality From Coronavirus Alone

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I suspect that is far, far higher than it is for the flu.

https://straightstatistics.fullfact.org/article/flu-deaths-triumph-statistics-not-virology

This is on UK methodology, but it’s common enough. It’s essentially how they came up with “3000 Hurricane deaths in PR”.

[oh8eleven]

Treatment for cancer absolutely destroys ...
A good friend of mine AND his wife (early 70s) are going through chemo.
That alone was bad enough ... now they're scared $hitless.

[relictele]

“Well, ther’ ain’t no sense in it. A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, ‘Why, he stumped his toe.’ Would ther’ be any sense in that? No. And ther’ ain’t no sense in this, nuther. Is it ketching?”

Mark Twain had it right in Huckleberry Finn. This headline and this so-called coronavirus death has a huge number of other causes or contributing factors.

[Borges]

This Tony Awards speech photo suggests he was not in the best of health.

[EdnaMode]

RIP

[Buckeye McFrog]

Paragraph 26: Died in a plane crash, but had tested postive for Corona

I had a great-uncle who liked to chew snuff. When he passed away New York State listed "tobacco use" as the cause of death on his death certificate.

He was 94

[LukeL]

I had childhood cancer and was on massive amounts of chemo (treatments every week for 15 months) today I rarely get sick. It has been over 20 years since I had the flu and a couple of years since my last cold. Perhaps children can recover better than adults.

[LeonardFMason]

Lung Cancer - COPD - 82 Years Old - GAY(HIV?)

Maybe his husband TOM could shed some light on it.

[xp38]

Another Trump kill. /sarc

[livius]

Oh, I see what you were asking. I’d say chances were pretty good that he was or had been a smoker. He was a playwright.

[MarvinStinson]

Playwright Terrence McNally

His plays cried out against Vietnam, satirized stale family dynamics, mocked sexual mores and became a part of the social protest movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

With his first Broadway play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, he put homosexuality squarely on stage.

¡Cuba Si! (1968) satirizes the disdain that contemporary America has for the idea of revolution even though America itself was a country born out of a revolution. In Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971) he celebrates while mourning the ineffectiveness of the American youth movement's conviction to "blow this country up so we can start all over again." Collectively, his early plays form a dark satire on American moral complacency.

McNally began to turn towards comedy and farce, which opened a new artistic avenue for the playwright.

The Ritz is a farce centering on a straight man who inadvertently takes refuge in a Mafia-owned gay bathhouse. Robert Drivas directed and although Drivas and McNally broke up as a couple in 1976 they remained close friends until Drivas died of AIDS-related complications ten years later.

Mid career

After the failure of Broadway, Broadway, McNally moved to Hollywood to reinvent himself but soon found himself back in New York City where a new chapter of his career began. During this period he formed a deep artistic relationship with Manhattan Theatre Club and the rapid spread of AIDS fundamentally changed his theatre.

His first credited Broadway musical was The Rink in 1984, a project he entered after the score by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb had been written. In 1990, McNally won an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Miniseries or Special for Andre's Mother, a drama about a woman trying to cope with her son's death from AIDS.

A year later, he returned to the stage with another AIDS-related play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart. In the play, two married couples spend the Fourth of July weekend at a summer house on Fire Island. The house has been willed to Sally Truman by her brother who has just died of AIDS.

With Kiss of the Spider Woman (based on the novel by Manuel Puig) in 1992, McNally returned to the musical stage, collaborating with Kander and Ebb on a script which explores the complex relationship between two men jailed together in a Latin American prison. For the book, McNally won the first of his four Tony Awards. Kiss of the Spider Woman won the 1993 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. He collaborated with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens on Ragtime in 1997, a musical adaptation of the E. L. Doctorow novel.

McNally's other plays include 1994's Love! Valour! Compassion!, with Lane and John Glover, which examines the relationships of eight gay men; it won McNally his second Tony Award.

1997 saw the world premiere of Corpus Christi, a modern-day retelling of the story of Jesus' birth, ministry, and death in which both he and his disciples are portrayed as homosexual.

The play was initially canceled because of death threats against the board members of the Manhattan Theatre Club, which was to produce the play. Banding together in defense of free creative expression, several other playwrights (including Athol Fugard) threatened to withdraw their plays if Corpus Christi was not produced; the board ultimately relented. When the play opened, the theatre was besieged by almost 2,000 protesters, furious at what they considered blasphemy. Subsequent to a 1999 opening of Corpus Christi in London, a group called the "Defenders of the Messenger Jesus" issued a fatwa sentencing McNally to death.In 2008, the play was revived in New York City at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. Reviewing this production for The New York Times, Jason Zinoman wrote that "without the noise of controversy, the play can finally be heard. Staged with admirable delicacy... the work seems more personal than political, a coming-of-age story wrapped in religious sentiment."

Late career

McNally's lifelong passion for classical music and opera is felt throughout many of his plays and musicals, and he's collaborated on several new American operas. He wrote the libretto for Dead Man Walking, his adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean's book, with a score by Jake Heggie. The opera had its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2000 and subsequently received two commercial recordings and over 40 productions worldwide, making it “one of the most successful American operas in recent decades."

The Kennedy Center presented three of McNally's plays that focus on opera, titled Nights at the Opera, in March 2010. In 2001, McNally started what became a 15-year developmental process towards Broadway with the musical The Visit, for which he wrote the book. The music is written by John Kander and the lyrics by Fred Ebb. Adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 satire, The Visit is the story of a widow who has amassed enormous sums of wealth and returns to her hometown to seek revenge on the villagers who scorned her in her youth.

Philadelphia Theatre Company presented Some Men, which explores the evolution of gay relationships and same-sex marriage.

Mothers and Sons starring Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre.. The play is an expansion on his 1988 drama Andre’s Mother, which was set at a memorial service for a victim of the AIDS crisis. Mothers and Sons also marked the first time a legally wed gay couple was portrayed on Broadway.

McNally's newest play, Fire and Air, premiered Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company on February 1, 2018.[64] The play explores the history of the Ballets Russes, the Russian ballet company, with a particular focus on Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet impresario, and Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer.

In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named him one of the Pride50 "trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people".

[ronnie raygun]

Many underlying conditions, on a regular flu year could have killed him

[centurion316]

Sounds like he led a risky life. Those behaviors take a toll over the years and along comes an unknown virus and you are done for.

[Nifster]

Still don’t care

Won’t read it

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Marv.

[MarvinStinson]

You are the only smart one here.

[Glad2bnuts]

I would say he is writing plays for Satan, but he already has done that.

1997 saw the world premiere of Corpus Christi, a modern-day retelling of the story of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in which both he and his disciples are portrayed as homosexual.