Terrence McNally (1938–2020) was an American playwright, musical-theatre book writer, librettist, and screenwriter. Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and raised partly in Corpus Christi, Texas, he graduated from Columbia College in 1960. Columbia records his birth on November 3, 1938, and death on March 24, 2020.
Major works
You can explore the different writing forms through his Tony-winning work, including the plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, and the books of the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. He also received a 2019 Tony for lifetime achievement. His foundation’s biography identifies these five awards and points readers toward his papers at the Harry Ransom Center. The book of a musical is a particular writing credit; it should not be expanded into sole authorship of its music and lyrics.
You have two useful entry points with very different structures. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune follows a waitress and a short-order cook through a night in her apartment as they negotiate whether their encounter could become a relationship. The play premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987. Master Class places the opera singer Maria Callas before students and an audience at a teaching session.
For actors: These structures give you ways to study both intimate negotiation and public performance. In one, a person must discover whether another person can be trusted. In the other, teaching, remembering, authority, and the presence of an audience create overlapping demands.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
Intimacy and the public room
What changes when your character has an audience? In Master Class, the teaching session supplies a public role, listeners and a reason to speak. You can investigate how authority is exercised through that arrangement, then how remembering complicates it. The actor has to make the immediate address clear even as the play moves among different kinds of attention. A general impression of Callas cannot do that work for you.
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune gives you another scale of exposure. The encounter has already brought two people close physically, but closeness does not settle what they can promise or believe. You can hear a small offer as an attempt to extend the relationship, then discover that the other person receives it as pressure. The dramatic action lives in those changing meanings. You need the particular words and the response they produce.
McNally's writing for musical theatre widens the question of form. When you study the book of Ragtime or Kiss of the Spider Woman, you are studying the scenes and dramatic construction within a collaboration that also includes music and lyrics. Follow what the spoken scene sets in motion and what the song changes. You can then return to dialogue with the consequences of that musical event present. The continuity is yours to perform even when the means of expression change. This is a productive reason to read McNally across several forms: you meet different arrangements of speech, song, memory and audience, each asking you to keep the human exchange precise.
Rehearsal questions
Try these independent study prompts with your chosen play.
For your Frankie and Johnny exchange, write down the concrete change each person seeks. Identify where the partner’s response makes the current approach stop working. On a second reading, track the apparently casual details: a question, an offer, a diversion, a silence. Which details alter the possibility of continuing the encounter? Resist treating a character’s uncertainty as a settled personality trait. Rehearse the possibility that the next response could change the decision.
For Master Class, map your speaker’s audiences. At a given moment, is the immediate target a student, the accompanist, the assembled audience, or someone being recalled? Read the surrounding text before deciding. Explore how the same physical room can contain a public teaching session and a private struggle without playing a generalized idea of an intimidating teacher.
When you study a musical, place a scene beside its neighboring song and record what changes between them. What can the character say or attempt after the song that was unavailable before it? Credit the collaborators separately and work from the actual edition. This question is a general approach to musical dramaturgy, not a claim that every McNally musical uses the same structure.
Interpreting the work
When you read Master Class, approach it as a dramatic work. Its Callas should not automatically be treated as an unedited historical transcript or as authoritative instruction in vocal technique. You can research the historical artist while also accounting for what McNally has written for this performance.
Related reading
Objective, obstacle, and tactic help distinguish a desired connection from the means used to achieve it; instrument links to the actor’s expressive capacities without turning a fictional class into a pedagogy manual.
Source for further study: The Terrence McNally Foundation.