Tangling with Texas and sexuality in Terrence McNally’s plays

Playwright Terrence McNally, 76, left his native Corpus Christi in 1956. He has rarely looked back. Now very much a New Yorker, he has chronicled many aspects of American culture — including the evolution of gay life — for more than five decades. Winner of multiple major honors, including the Tony Award, he is, along with Wharton’s Horton Foote and Austin’s Robert Schenkkan, among the state’s most distinguished playwrights.

Recently, his comic drama “Mothers and Sons” opened at Zach Theatre. It follows two characters, Katharine and Cal, introduced to television audiences in the Emmy Award-winning 1990 movie “Andre’s Mother.” In that show, both are devastated by the recent AIDS death of Andre, Katharine’s charismatic son and Cal’s partner. They struggle to connect. In the current show, Katharine has come to visit Cal, who is now married to Will, a writer, with whom he is raising a son, Bud.

The following is an edited version of a telephone conversation with McNally.

Statesman: First, thanks for trusting your papers to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. They’re enormously useful for understanding and enjoying your work. When did you start saving your drafts, correspondence and reviews with such care and thought to the future?

McNally: My heart is still with Maurine McElroy, my high school English teacher, who was incredibly influential in my life, and when she retired from teaching, she was head of the freshman English at UT. She was certainly the instigator of getting me to move my collection from Michigan to Texas, and I’ve been very happy with that choice. I’ve had people doing research there, and the cooperation they’ve found from the library has been extraordinary. I once lost a packet of scripts, and they said, “Yes, we have it,” and I had a reproduction to me within 72 or 48 hours. They’ve been great.

I read several drafts of “Andre’s Mother” at the Ransom Center. How did it begin as an 8-minute sketch, and why did it turn into a PBS teleplay?

There was a revue called “Urban Blight” with 12 writers and short sketches about all that was going on in New York at the time. (“Urban Blight” was produced by the Manhattan Theater Club in 1988.) It was the height of the AIDS epidemic. I was upset by the number of memorial services I would see, every two or three days with these white balloons. It was very theatrical, and when I wrote it, (Katharine) had nothing to say.

About a year later, PBS asked me to turn it into a teleplay, and again Andre’s mother’s mother had more to say than she did, the part played by Sylvia Sydney. And then Bucks County Playhouse wanted us to create a stage play adaptation, and I agreed to it and then reread it and realized that so much has happened in the past 25 years that, I thought, let’s bring it up to date. It’s based on previous characters, but Katharine never had a voice before, so she’s completely new, as are Will and Bud. Cal is the common denominator. And I’ve come to love the character, in part because Tyne Daily was my muse. She played this on Broadway and in London.

Katharine’s reticence and rigidness — sometimes read by critics as bitterness — what’s the key to understanding Katherine?

I think she suddenly realizes that when Cal goes, she will have lost all touch with her son and will be completely isolated. She’s in a foreign culture, she’s a Yankee at heart, but spent most of her life in Texas, never feeling like a Texan, alienated from her son. And she knows she’s on the wrong side of history, and it’s a sad position to find yourself in. I find her a sad character, and I have sympathy for her. I don’t agree with half of what she says, but I understand her and felt compassion for her when I wrote the play.

And I think that millions of people are shaken to their core by what has happened and is happening — by AIDS, by the movement of equality, obviously by marriage equality, and I think she’s a relevant character. I think the Supreme Court will come out in favor of same-sex marriage … but people will still have strong feelings. Just because something changes in law doesn’t mean that it changes that day. We have a lot of hearts and minds that need to come a long way. Cal is the only person alive who knew Andre. Those pictures in that box mean nothing to anyone when she goes and when Cal goes. There’s a moment in the play when she says, “There’s really nothing of Andre in Bud,” and Will says, “Of course not.” She’s the end of the line, and it was her own doing, and she is in a very cold and lonely place.

While we are on the subject, did you see marriage equality coming, back in 1989, when you wrote “Andre’s Mother?” Was it even on the horizon?

Absolutely not. I did not see that coming. I came to New York in the early fall of ’56. I was 17, and I went to Columbia. It was a very, very different world then, and I certainly did not foresee this, in any sense, happening. The minute I saw this whole movement beginning, I was happy to write and support it as much as I could. … I hate to say anything good about AIDS, but there certainly wasn’t a sense of community, and then we saw that maybe we could accomplish something politically and we could effect change. You don’t see it happening, change happening, until you see one person take a stand.

We’re good friends with Edith Windsor, who was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case. It took one woman to say she wouldn’t pay the death tax of 600K on her deceased partner, when a straight couple wouldn’t be sent this bill, and she refused to pay the tax and it resulted in DOMA being struck down. I’m sure Rosa Parks didn’t wake up and say, “I’m going to make history today.” She just said, “I’m not going to the back of the bus,” but it takes a certain individual to do it. I’ve never been one of those, but I hope my writing inspires people to move forward. I’ve been married since — I don’t even know the year, but we went to Vermont for our legal civil union, which I think of as marriage — but I’ve been married for a good 12 years. And I’ve been very supportive of the movement. People get tired of me proselytizing about it, but it really does change a relationship.

In both plays, you’re pretty rough on your native state. Texas comes off as backward, boring, even dangerous. At its best, Texas is a laugh line. Do you feel that strongly about Texas?

Not really. It’s a combo of things. I don’t feel much love for Corpus Christi, but I got a great high school education at a great high school with a teacher who changed my life. … I was in Texas about a month ago. My brother moved to Victoria, and they’re doing a production of mine, and it would mean a lot to him if I went. I went to Corpus — it’s about an hour away — and I made peace with it. I had good friends there. None of them live there anymore — we all moved — but it’s a good town. People there have a sense of curiosity about what the rest of the world would be like and tend to get out of there early. I made my peace with the house I grew up in, went to Padre Island, and had a good cry.

My brother is the only true Texan in the family. I just grew up there. Being a young man who was gay and restless, I always knew I would live in New York. It wasn’t a big thing. When I saw “On the Town,” with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: “That’s where I want to live.” I’ve never regretted it. I feel at home in New York, or I feel like a very welcome visitor. … If you really want to work in theater and you’re serious about it — and I got serious about this pretty early — it’s the only practical city to live in. If you can find a way. And I was very lucky that this was a much more welcoming city to new artists in the ’60s than it is now. It’s too expensive to live here now. The young writers I know live in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. Nobody can live on the island now. When I got here at 17, I didn’t even visit Brooklyn. I wouldn’t leave the island, and now young people can’t afford to be on the island, but they seem happy and find a way to make ends meet.

Some Other Major Works by Terrence McNally