Terrence McNally’s plays are all about connection, and I’ve felt a pull towards them since the first one I saw.
FSU staged Lips Together, Teeth Apart while I was a student; it was miraculous, and it led me to read more of his work.
In fact, I’ve read all of his works and millions of words about them–in graduate school, I wrote his 10,000 word entry in the American Writers encyclopedia.
Today, having learned that he’s gone due to Covid 19, I am heartbroken. Writing this is hard; I’m crying. I’m thinking about the beauty of his dialogue, his integration of music, his themes. I’m thinking of my favorite works, the already-mentioned Lips Together, Teeth Apart, A Perfect Ganesh (the Ganesha I have in my bedroom is an allusion to this play), and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. These works are all about our need for connection and about how fear keeps us from letting down our walls. My favorite quote is Johnny’s:
I want to kill myself sometimes when I think I’m the only person in the world and the part of me that feels that way is trapped inside this body that only bumps into other bodies without ever connecting with the only other person in the world trapped inside of them. We gotta connect. We just have to. Or we die.
It’s ironic that McNally was felled by a virus that preys upon physical closeness and connection. But it’s precisely connection that we need to build to save ourselves–not physical closeness, but emotional closeness. We have to resist those who tell us the stock market is more important than each other’s lives. Connection in this time of crisis is understanding why we need to be more connected as we move ourselves physically apart.
Lips Together, Teeth Apart–our souls are the lips, our bodies are the teeth, for now.
Each little decision to keep a stranger safe is “a tiny leap across that void between two people.”
Today, I’ll have to tell my students that McNally is gone. This term, we watched Frankie and Johnny figure out how to love.
And tonight, I’m going to reread A Perfect Ganesh.
For now, I’ll leave you with the end of my article:
Terrence McNally goes to the theater at least three nights a week (the other nights are for opera and the ballet). He believes in the vitality and life of the theater in an age when the majority of the American public ignores theater. His works are part of the reason why the rest of us can keep believing. Perhaps people do not picket anymore when a play should be seen, like they did for McNally’s first play. If America were populated with people who were willing to demonstrate for great theater, McNally’s plays would give them something to picket for.
