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Terrence McNally
Biography:
Born 1939 in Florida. Grew up in Texas. Graduated from Columbia
University. Won Tony Awards for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master
Class as well as Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical for Ragtime and
Kiss
of the Spider Woman. In addition, Love! Valour! Compassion! won the Drama
Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and New York Drama Critics' Circle awards for Best Play.
McNally has received two Guggenheim fellowships, a Rockefeller grant, and a citation from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. |
Almost Home
"The coming-of-age of two adolescents in the drugged 1970s, by the
author of Until Your Heart Stops (1993) and the Flannery O'Connor
Award collection of 1992, Low Flying Aircraft. Elizabeth Pinski
first notices Patrick McConnell because he's so nondescript: small,
friendless, and always wearing the same worn-out sweater. Then in the
high-school choir, Elizabeth hears him hit a high C and, a talented
musician herself, falls in love. Patrick loves her, too, partly because of
the long scar up her arm, the result of an accident in her childhood. Both
of McNallys characters are shy as deer, sensitive, wounded: Elizabeth's
physical scar seems also to be psychic; and Patrick, a newcomer to
Paradise Valley, Arizona, is still shaky after his father's suicide.
There's an obstacle, though, to their love: Elizabeth's brutal boyfriend
Bittner, whose rough strength and lack of subtlety she had thought she
could cling to as a bulwark against the hedonistic environment she's
growing up in, where sex and cocaine salve despair. Bittner beats up
Patrick, and he doesn't interfere when a cocaine addict has sex with a
dozen young men in order to pay for her habit, then tries to kills
herself. Elizabeth saves the girl and undergoes a spiritual change: She
finds that sweet Patrick is strong, too, in his innate decency. Patrick
has a clever dog, Germs, and the three cruise the strip of their
rambunctious new suburb north of Phoenix, finding not only love but the
values they'll need to survive in an amoral world. Once again, though,
Bittner enters their lives, bringing with him the euphoria of cocaine and
the misery that follows it, but they pull through. Elizabeth and Patrick
have real charm, particularly in scenes with Patrick's delightful dog, but
the drug story nearly overwhelms them." (Kirkus Reviews, 1998)
"McNally doesn't believe in easy solutions
to complicated problems, and his plotting is consistently sharp."
(Edie Jarolim, The New York Times Book Review)
Paperback - 240 pages (May 1999) $9.60
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Corpus Christi:
A Play
The
New Yorker has called Terrence McNally "one of our most original
and audacious dramatists and one of our funniest." He is the author
of such critically acclaimed plays as Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master
Class, The Lisbon Traviata, and Frankie and Johnny in the
Clair de Lune. In Corpus Christi, McNally gives us his own
unique view of the story of Christ, and in doing so provides us with one
of the most vivid and moving passion plays written. McNally's
controversial new play is an affirmation of faith and a drama of such
power and scope that it has been called blasphemy by the religious right
and hailed by audiences and critics alike as one of his best and most
poignant works to date. Providing readers with his own unique view of the
story of Christ, McNally gives a controversial affirmation of faith and a
drama of power and scope.
Quotes from the back cover:
"One of McNally's best,
most moving and personal works . . . His updating of the Christ story is
witty but not patronizing, as sober and cleansing as a dip in baptismal
water." (Richard Zoglin, Time)
"Corpus Christi provides a
frequently fascinating experience. . . . [It] explores a quest for faith
by a segment of the population - homosexuals - that has for centuries
been excluded and condemned by the pious God-fearing." (Erik
Jackson, Time Out New York)
"Terrence McNally's
controversial new play is a moving, perhaps even spiritual
experience." (Dick Schaap, ABC World News)
Paperback - 128 pages 1 edition
(April 1999) $9.60
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Lips Together, Teeth Apart
As two couples spend the 4th of July in a house left to one of the women
by her brother, a victim of AIDS, they mask their fear with desperate wit
and hide inside uncomfortable marriages - each character struggling to
come to terms with a world of anxious isolation haunted by ever-present
death.
Paperback (December 1995) $7.96
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Love!
Valour! Compassion! and a Perfect Ganesh: Two Plays
"McNally's big hit of last season - Love! Valour! Compassion! is
one of those rare works that lives up to its hype. By turns charming and
poignant, funny and sad, sweet and sexy, the play follows a group of close
gay friends and their assorted boyfriends and family through a season at a
summer place in upstate New York. As in life, the great dramatic moments
are quiet and underplayed; for example, the betrayal at the peak of the
play, which ultimately threatens to tear apart the closest of friends,
begins as an unplanned sexual indiscretion. With this play, McNally shows
he has become a master at handling serious issues in comic ways or
revealing in a breathtaking instant the tragedy that lies just behind
comedy. This triumph is paired with McNally's recent bomb, A Perfect
Ganesh, a flawed but intriguing work in which we follow a pair of
suburbanites on their tour of India." (Jack Helbig, Booklist)
Paperback (May 1997) $10.36
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Master Class
"Just in time for its Broadway debut this fall, after sold-out
engagements in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, Master Class
is Tony award-winning Terrence McNally's homage to Maria Callas, inspired
by a series of master classes she conducted at Juilliard. A play of
notable wit, humanity, and insight." (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Paperback (December 1995) $7.96
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Terrence McNally:
15 Short Plays
"As anyone who follows theater knows, McNally, for the last decade or
so, has been on a roll, turning out one witty, well-crafted off-Broadway
comedy after another - Lisbon Traviata; Lips Together, Teeth
Apart; and Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune, not to
mention the Tony-winning book to the Broadway musical Kiss of the
Spiderwoman. Less well known is the fact that McNally is a writer of
remarkable breadth and depth, equally adept at one-act and full-evening
plays, and equally at home writing satire, farce, or tragicomedy. This
collection of his shorter works provides a fascinating overview of a
master whose career began in the New York off-off-Broadway boom of the
late 1960s. Some of the plays haven't aged well - the 1968 antiwar satire,
Next, seems particularly irrelevant now - but a lot are still quite
funny, even biting, after all these years. Notably included are two of
McNally's most popular 1970s plays, Whiskey and his farce set in
New York's disco-era gay bathhouse scene, The Ritz." (Jack
Helbig, Booklist)
Paperback - 373 pages (June 1994) $16.95
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Terrence McNally:
Collected Plays
Paperback (October 1996) $14.95
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Three Plays by Terrence McNally:
The Lisbon Traviata, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune
and It's Only a Play
Paperback - 241 pages
(December 1995) $9.56
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Adaptation
Paperback $5.25
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And Things That Go Bump in the
Night
Paperback $5.25
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Apple
Pie: Three Short Plays
Paperback $5.25
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Bad
Habits
Paperback $5.25
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By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful
Sea
Paperback $5.25
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¡Cuba
Si!, Bringing it All Back Home, Last Gasps
Paperback $5.25
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Faith, Hope and
Charity
Paperback $5.25
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Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de
Lune
Paperback $5.25
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It's Only a
Play
Paperback $5.25
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The Lisbon
Traviata
Paperback $5.25
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Sweet Eros and
Witness
Paperback $5.25
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Where Has Tommy Flowers
Gone?
Paperback $5.25
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Whiskey
Paperback $3.25
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