Kirjahaku

"Terrence McNally is one of our most original and audacious dramatists and one of our funniest."--The New Yorker These three stunning plays are a testament to the extraordinary talent and comedic brilliance of Terrence McNally. All produced off-Broadway to great acclaim, his most recent works are gathered here for the first time in a unique collection of drama, romance, and comedy. The Lisbon Traviata is a powerfully moving tragicomedy about a crumbling homosexual marriage. And in Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune, a man and a woman, "not young, not old, no great beauties, either one," come together in a fresh and witty display of emotional fireworks. McNally himself describes the final piece, the bitingly honest and uproariously funny It's Only a Play, as his "attempt to describe exactly what I was like to work in Broadway in the 1980s." These three unforgettable works, starkly individual yet all charged with brilliant wit and searing intimacy, dazzle us with McNally's wisdom, compassion, and extraordinary brand of comic genius.

The 1996 Tony Award winner for Best Play "unforgettable, worth swimming to New York to catch" (Benedict Nightingale) Master Class presents the legendary opera diva, Maria Callas, as she puts aspiring young singers through their paces in a series of master classes. Both moving and entertaining, this theatrical tour de force dramatizes the Callas phenomenon and "is an unembarrassed, involving meditation on Callas's life and the nature of her art. Such subjects are not easily dramatized, certainly not with this brio." (New York Times)

Drama Desk Award Winner for Outstanding New Play "One of Mr. McNally's finest plays--and one that hasn't dated, despite its apparently topical subject matter."--The New York Times "McNally's wit and wild comedy invariably score, and his darker intentions resonate, making Lips Together one of his most accomplished plays."--New York Daily News"A brilliant comedy."--The New Yorker At the heart of this haunting play is a dramatically incisive portrait of two married couples--the Trumans and the Haddocks. Uncomfortable with themselves and each other, they are forced to spend a Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island house that the brother of one of the women left his sister when he died of AIDS. Though the house is beautiful, it is as empty as their lives and marriages have become, a symbol of their failed hopes, their rage, their fears, and of the capricious nature of death. Acerbic and haunting, Lips Together, Teeth Apart probes the stifled lives of people and their prejudices with a stunning clarity that resonates long after. The author of such critically acclaimed plays as The Lisbon Traviata and Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune, Terrence McNally has graced the American theater with a voice that captures our fear of intimacy in the modern age with dead-on insight, wit, and poignancy. But never has he blended these disparate elements into such a brilliantly cohesive whole as he has in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, hailed by Frank Richard of the New York Times as McNally's "most ambitious and most accomplished play yet."

A unique look of the story of Christ dramatically explores the homosexual quest for faith

The Stendhal Syndrome is named for the French novelist, who on a visit to Florence had such a visceral and physical reaction to its beauty that he wrote, "I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall." Now Terrence McNally, one of our most beloved playwrights, has crafted two stunning and witty plays about art and how it transforms us. Full Frontal Nudity explores the reaction of three American tourists to the perfection and beauty of Michelangelo's David. In Prelude and Liebstod, a renowned conductor watches his life unravel while conducting Wagner's musical masterpiece. With its world premiere in the winter of 2004 starring Frank Langella and Isabella Rossellini, The Stendhal Syndrome will join the ranks of important plays by this American master.

Four-time Tony Award?winning author Terrence McNally returns with a powerful new play about how far one will go for one’s love of the theater. In a small upstate New York town, Lou, a speech and drama teacher, and Jessie, a dog groomer at The Dapper Dog, bring joy to their community through running an amateur theater company. They become obsessed with buying a derelict movie theater and turning it into Captain Lou and Miss Jessie’s Magic Theater for Children of All Ages. The only obstacle in reaching their dream is Annabelle Willard ? a terminally ill and manipulative widow who owns half the town. Will these naive dreamers be able to grasp the brass ring, and at what cost?

The New Yorker has called Terrence McNally "one of our most original and audacious dramatists and one of our funniest." Now the four-time Tony Award-winning author of such classics as Love! Valor! Compassion! and Master Class returns with two heartrending and humorous plays about friendship, companionship, and love. In Some Men, Terrence McNally takes us on a multigenerational journey of gay life in America. In interwoven vignettes, McNally uses the same characters at different points in their lives as gay men to address such issues as coming out, marriage, adoption, the military, and the AIDS crisis. In Deuce we meet Leona and Midge&#8212two septuagenarian ladies doubles tennis champions who are reunited to be honored at a U.S. Open. As they watch the next generaion of female atheletes, these former tennis partners become embroiled in a verbal tete-a-tete as lively and nuanced as any match they ever played.

The world can and will go on without us but I have to think that we have made this world a better place. That we have left it richer, wiser than had we not chosen the way of art.The 1996 Tony Award winner for Best Play.Terrence McNally's Master Class presents the legendary opera diva, Maria Callas, as she puts aspiring young singers through their paces in a series of master classes. Both moving and entertaining, this theatrical tour de force dramatizes the Callas phenomenon and "is an unembarrassed, involving meditation on Callas's life and the nature of her art. Such subjects are not easily dramatized, certainly not with this brio." (New York Times)After opening on Broadway in 1995 with Zoe Caldwell and Audra McDonald, the play premiered in London in 1997 with Patti LuPone. It was last revived on Broadway and in the West End in 2011-12 starring Tyne Daly.

Acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally’s works are characterized by such diversity that critics have sometimes had difficulty identifying the pattern in his carpet. To redress this problem, In Muse of Fire, Raymond-Jean Frontain has collected McNally’s most illuminating meditations on the need of the playwright to first change hearts in order to change minds and thereby foster a more compassionate community. When read together, these various meditations demonstrate the profound ways in which McNally himself functioned as a member of the theater community—as strikingly original dramatic voice, as generous collaborator, and even as the author of eloquent memorials.These pieces were originally written to be delivered on both highly formal occasions (academic commencement exercises, award ceremonies, memorial services) and as off-the-cuff comments at highly informal gatherings, like a playwriting workshop at the New School. They reveal a man who saw theater not as the vehicle for abstract ideas or the platform for political statements, but as the exercise of our shared humanity. “Theatre is collaborative, but life is collaborative,” McNally says. “Art is important to remind us that we’re not alone, and this is a wonderful world and we can make it more wonderful by fully embracing each other. [. . .] I don’t know why it’s so hard to remind ourselves sometimes, but thank God we’ve had great artists who don’t let us forget. And thank the audiences who support them because I think that those artists’ true mission has been to bring the barriers down, break them down; not build walls, but tear them down.”