The Ritz and other plays

MCNALLY, Terrence

Dodd, Mead

“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.

Three Plays by Terrence Mcnally

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Publishing Group

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.”

Lips Together, Teeth Apart: A Play (Drama, Plume)

Humor & Entertainment

Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune

Plume

Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh: Two Plays (Drama, Plume)

Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh: Two Plays (Drama, Plume)

Master Class is a pyrotechnical theater—fireworks in a contained space where Maria Callas is brought back to life in Sturm und Drang. Inspired by a series of master classes the great diva conducted at Juilliard toward the end of her career, this drama puts Maria Callas at center stage again as she coaxes, prods, and inspires students—"victims" as she calls them—into giving the performances of their lives while revealing her own. As she slips off into memories, we experience her days at La Scala, her marriage to Meneghini, and her great doomed love for Aristotle Onassis. But the dazzling theatricality comes from Callas's emotional explosions, her cutting wit, and the soaring music as each student sings an aria that exposes the Divina's vulnerabilities … and her genius.

Master Class

Beautifully written, moving, and very funny, Love Valour Compassion gathers together eight gay men at the upstate New York summer house of a celebrated dancer-choreographer who fears he is losing his creativity...and possibly his lover. Infidelity, flirtations, soul-searching, AIDS, truth-telling, and skinny-dipping mix monumental questions about life and death with a wacky dress rehearsal for Swan Lake performed in drag. The result is a cross between a gay Big Chill and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. To read it is to join in a dance of life.

Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh (movie tie-in) (Drama, Plume)

Characters: 15 male, 3 female
Scenery: Interior
Winner of multiple Tony Awards including Best Musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman revamps a harrowing tale of persecution into a dazzling spectacle that juxtaposes gritty realities with liberating fantasies. Cell mates in a Latin American prison, Valentin is a tough revolutionary undergoing torture and Molina is an unabashed homosexual serving eight years for deviant behavior. Molina shares his fantasies about an actress, Aurora (originated on Br

Kiss of the Spider Woman (French's Musical Library)

Kander, John

Ebb, Fred

Concord Theatricals

Anastasia: The Musical

Ahrens, Lynn

Flaherty, Stephen

The Full Monty - The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical

Religion & Spirituality

Yazbek, David

Christian Books & Bibles

Applause

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Books by MCNALLY, Terrence