Trafficking in mere humanity: Shakespeare, McNally and the reach of "this wooden O".

Frontain, Raymond-Jean

"O for a Muse of fire," Katharine Brynne exclaims whenever she experiences something so extraordinary that language otherwise fails her while on a tour of India in Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh (1993). The phrase, she readily acknowledges, comes from the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V. "How hard it is to really describe anything," she explains to her traveling companion, the decidedly less effusive Margaret Civil (37). "'Muse of fire' is my talisman. It's my way of telling myself 'Savor this moment. [...] Relish it. It is important. You'll never be here or feel this way again'" (38). In the course of her journey, Katharine meets a young, gay American doctor weakened by an AIDS-related illness. Having once played Henry in a college production, he is able to recite with her the better part of the Chorus's speech, thus bringing it to the forefront of McNally's audience's consciousness, at least for the duration of the play.

Shakespeare's prologue--with its meditation upon the power of "this wooden O" to stimulate, yet adequately represent, the reach of the human imagination--proves a resonant subtext for a play in which a village puppet master comments upon the different purposes of, and differing levels of audience engagement required by, South Asian and American styles of theater. What is more, Katharine's proprietary regard for Shakespeare's speech models the manner in which, throughout his career, McNally conjures with the idea of Shakespeare as a cultural touchstone and appropriates for his own purposes Shakespeare's language. For McNally, Shakespeare's plays represent the height of the creative imagination, in particular the human ability through art to resist metaphysical annihilation. In addition, Shakespeare's language provides McNally's characters with a kind of shorthand by which they express their deepest, and otherwise difficult-to-articulate, feelings. Finally, Shakespeare's theater provides a stimulus to McNally's own dramaturgy, McNally attempting--although never completing--a farce that uses Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to comment on the 1960s' "Sexual Revolution." Analysis of the multiple levels of McNally's engagement with Shakespeare not only offers a telling instance of the power of influence (as opposed to Harold Bloom's anxiety of the same), but also helps map the extent of Shakespeare's absorption by popular culture.

Shakespeare's influence upon McNally's development as a playwright cannot be overstated. Throughout his career, McNally has used the name of Shakespeare as a synonym for the power of the human imagination. In And Things that Go Bump in the Night (1965), McNally's first commercially produced play, Clarence, a young, ineffectual gay man, is seduced by a handsome stranger only to be subsequently humiliated by the man and his family. (His very name associates him with George, Duke of Clarence, who, in Richard III, is betrayed by those close to him.) Cajoled by his condescending hosts into articulating his philosophy of life, Clarence explains that--unlike Ruby, whose nihilism fosters in her children a willingness to "suck the bitter root" of despair (13)--he negotiates threats to his happiness through a belief in "Shakespeare, Florence ... [and the hope of meeting] someone in the park" (51). For Clarence-and, by extension, McNally--the only possible antidotes to despair are the power of human creation (represented by the works of Shakespeare and the artistic glories of Renaissance Florence) and the possibility of human relationship.

In interviews, McNally has repeatedly cited Shakespeare as "the greatest writer who ever lived. The greatest creative mind that ever existed" (Myers 34). In keeping with, but well in advance of, Harold Bloom's claim that Shakespeare "invented the human," McNally has argued that Shakespeare's work manifests "the greatest mind, heart and soul" yet preserved in print (McNally, "Edited"). Throughout his career McNally has testified to the example that Shakespeare offers the modem playwright. "Theatre allows you to think big," he said in 1986 when questioned about his choice of career. "Your imagination can be infinite. My model was Shakespeare" (Alperson 63). For McNally, Shakespeare's genius is due in large part to a deep reservoir of compassion for people who are innately different from himself, thus providing his theater with an amplitude unequaled in the canon of any other playwright. Shakespeare "creates a different language and a different world for every play he writes," McNally marvels (Myers 34). Not surprisingly, when asked by an interviewer to explain why each of his own plays is so different from the last, the result being that there is no such thing as a "typical" McNally play, McNally draws upon the example of Shakespeare to justify his own resistance to formula: "I like the fact that Shakespeare mixes humor and tragedy, rich people and poor, smart people and dumb people. To me Shakespeare is like living in New York City. There is this explosion of different people and sounds and smells" (Ledford 4). (1)

Even as he has acknowledged over the years that he has read and regularly rereads the entire Shakespeare canon, McNally has recalled on numerous occasions the experience of how he first discovered the writing of the man whom he calls "God": "I bless my high school English teacher every day for making me fall in love with him when I was 15" (McNally, "Edited"). McNally inscribes that teacher, Maureen Davenport McElroy, within his plays as the quintessential educator whose primary vehicle for engaging her students is Shakespeare; in the process McNally unwittingly documents a chapter in the history of Shakespeare pedagogy in America. (2) In Corpus Christi (1998), the teacher who inculcates in Joshua a love of poetry--particularly of Shakespeare's Sonnets (another one of which he memorizes in advance of their weekly meeting)--is named "Mrs. McElroy." She introduces him to Massenet's Thaws while they play chess and enjoy a surprisingly adult conversation about the effect of time on physical beauty (25-7); Joshua's classmates cannot understand why he prefers Mrs. McElroy's company to theirs. Similarly, in Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams (2005), a young sound technician surprises a group of seemingly more culturally self-aware theater people with his appreciation of Shakespeare. In a statement that might be read as McNally's description of his own high school mentor's method, Toby explains:

I had an English teacher in high school, Mrs. McElroy--it's all thanks to her. Mrs. Mac taught us Romeo and Juliet were just two young people in love and that we should just feel the words, even if we didn't understand all of them. [...] She had us do scenes from the plays. Sometimes when I'm on my bike and nobody can hear me, I do "To be or not to be." I still remember the Tent Scene from Julius Caesar. (46)

"Growing up in a small town in Texas, it would have been very easy to be a total redneck," McNally recalled over thirty years after he had graduated high school. "To have a woman like that who had so much to offer! It was amazing--I mean I could have gone to an agricultural school to become a farmer" were it not for McElroy (Myers 34). Instead, as McNally records in a 1998 address to New York State high school teachers, McElroy challenged him to apply to schools out of state rather than attend Texas A&M University, as the majority of his college-bound classmates would do. (3) Consequently, just two months before his eighteenth birthday McNally left Texas for New York City to attend Columbia College, the undergraduate arm of Columbia University, where he came under the influence of a second gifted Shakespeare instructor, Professor Andrew Chiappe. (4) In a recent interview, McNally commented that Chiappe's course was particularly valuable to him in terms of his development as a playwright in that Chiappe had the class read Shakespeare's canon in its entirety and chronologically rather than by genre, the latter practice long encouraged in Shakespeare courses by the organization of the 1623 Folio. McNally believes that Chiappe's approach allowed students to understand why, in the course of his professional development, Shakespeare had to write the bloody and shrill Titus Andronicus before he could attempt the more resonantly symphonic King Lear (Personal Interview).

Four of McNally's typewritten papers for that two-semester course (1958-59), which contain the grader's handwritten annotations and evaluative comments, survive in the McNally Archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas: "Shakespeare's Early Development as a Tragedian," "The Family as a Dramatic Theme in King Lear and The Winter's Tale," "The Overreacher," and "Spiritual Movement in King Lear" (HRC 57.6). They help map the emotional terrain of the twenty-year-old McNally. Anticipating in prescient ways the subject matter of the plays that he would begin writing only after his graduation the following year, they also offer theater historians the opportunity to document Shakespeare's influence on a later playwright from the intellectual womb to full maturity.

McNally's analyses of Lear and Leontes, for example, betray his interest in the emotionally troubled parent who tyrannizes over his or her family, a scenario that McNally explores in three of his earliest plays: This Side of the Door (an unpublished play which was produced in 1962 by the Playwrights Unit of Actors Studio at New York's Cherry Lane Theater, starring a young Estelle Parsons), And Things That Go Bump in the Night, and Here's Where I Belong (1968), a musical version of John Steinbeck's East of Eden for which McNally wrote the book. Likewise, McNally's study of the Overreacher character type in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama not only anticipates his fascination with emotionally detached, manipulative observers of other peoples' lives like Stephen in The Lisbon Traviata (1985, rev. 1989) and "John the Foul" in Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) but reads like a character sketch for McNally's fictionalized portrait of a brilliant, driven, and deeply lonely Maria Callas in Master Class (1995).

In addition, McNally's astute study of religious references in King Lear, which he uses to demonstrate the development of Lear's, Gloucester's, Edgar's, and Cordelia's varying abilities to accept the "universal realities of existence" (that is, aging and death), might serve as a prelude to the tetralogy of plays that depict American life at the height of the AIDS epidemic: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh, and Love! Valour! Compassion! However, the undergraduate McNally's fascination with Cordelia as the incarnation of "selfless, spontaneous love" most clearly anticipates his own theater's persistent concern with the gentle person's ability to negotiate-- even when he or she is unable to contain or deflect--the threat of violence. In the most daring of McNally's early plays--an untitled and apparently never produced family drama (HRC 58.1)--a father's brutalization of Bill, his sensitive, twenty-year-old playwright son, inadvertently results at the close of Act I in the death of his younger, preferred son, James, who, unlike Bill, is a star athlete. The play shifts in Act II from a William Inge-style middle-class domestic drama to a Pirandelloesque mode when James, freed by death both from his father's overbearing expectations of him on the playing field, and from his playwright-brother's narrative control, returns on stage to redirect the play's action. James (also the name given to the "fair" brother in Love!) encourages Bill to think of the ways in which theater can bring peace to both the playwright and his audience. James explains that what the playwright chooses to remember either deepens or tempers any residual bitterness over past events; and how the playwright chooses to represent those actions on stage will either stimulate the audience's bile or allow audience members the peace that accompanies catharsis (II-2, 22).

Indeed, the entire of McNally's theater might be analyzed in terms of his evolving attempts to use theater to foster a peace that can only come from the acceptance of difference. While Bobby's aria concerning divine love (Love! 87) makes him the most Cordelia-like character in McNally's canon, the theater-goer hears in James's tender-hearted forgiveness of the brother by whom he has been wronged (Love! 124-25) the quiet, sad, yet deeply loving music of Cordelia's "No cause, no cause" in response to Lear's abject apology for having doubted her love (Lear 4.7.77, Conflated Text). McNally's libretto for the opera Dead Man Walking (2000) questions how one may obtain forgiveness from those whom one has wronged, as well as find within oneself the power to forgive the individual responsible for one's most painful personal loss, questions McNally first formally addressed in his undergraduate essay on King Lear.

Shakespeare was the single greatest literary influence on McNally during his formative years. Consequently, Shakespeare's language has come to be tightly woven into the fabric of McNally's plays. Some instances are little more than invitations to the literate reader or playgoer to enjoy the verbal games to which Shakespeare's language lends itself. At more critical moments in McNally's dramatic texts, the works of Shakespeare provide an emotional lexicon for McNally's characters, allowing them to access a depth of feeling otherwise beyond their verbal reach. In almost every one of McNally's major plays, a character resorts to a line, or even just a phrase, from Shakespeare for self-expression, a process by which McNally uses the text of Shakespeare to comment upon his own.

McNally's most casual allusions to Shakespeare are invariably farcical, as when a British-born bartender in 1960s New York City camps with a flirtatious patron who's asked how he is able to remain so young in appearance. "Age cannot wither, nor custom stale our infinite variety" (Some Men 29; compare Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.240-41), the bartender airily replies, turning Enobardus's use of "custom" as habitude into a pun upon his own wearying involvement in the service industry, "custom" additionally signaling in British English a tradesman's involvement in commerce. Similarly, in It's Only a Play (1985) an avant garde director describes his production of Titus Andronicus: "I did the whole thing in mime. No dialogue. No poetry. No Shakespeare" (189). (5) McNally seems to believe that mere mention of the bloody spectacle of Titus--more so than mention of any other play by Shakespeare--can induce laughter. In Love! Valour! Compassion! Buzz argues that

My three-year-old gay niece knows Shakespeare was gay. So was Anne Hathaway. So was her cottage. So was Julius Caesar. So was Romeo and Juliet. So was Hamlet. So was King Lear. Every character Shakespeare wrote was gay. Except for Titus Andronicus. Titus was straight. Go figure. (114-15)

Buzz's speech mocks the excesses of the social phenomenon of "outing" that dominated gay social discourse in the 1990s when, in response to discrimination against AIDS sufferers, activists sought to force closeted figures to disclose their homosexuality and thus possibly temper the opprobrium heaped upon gays for a virus that they neither created nor whose circulation they controlled. Titus proves the only Shakespearean character that a good-natured, well-intentioned, but acutely exasperated activist does not wish to claim for his cause.

A television pilot McNally wrote in November 1983 for producer Norman Lear likewise finds in Shakespeare the means of indicating a character's ridiculousness. "The Education of Young Harry Bellair, Esq." (HRC 10.5), set in late seventeenth-century London, draws upon the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy while insisting that the audience hear and process echoes of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The greatest pleasure Harry's more sedate brother John takes in life comes from attending the theater. His conversation is peppered with references to his fellow ardent theater-goer, the diarist Samuel Pepys, as well as the actress Sarah Siddons (McNally seems to have forgotten Siddons dominated the London stage nearly two generations after Pepys). John's comic foible is to respond to even the most pedestrian domestic circumstance in terms of the theater. Thus, he becomes inordinately excited when a morbidly jealous member of the household, who fears he has just been cuckolded, echoes Hamlet's denunciation of Claudius after the ghost has confirmed the prince's suspicions of Gertrude's concupiscence and of King Hamlet's murder:

Jeremy: O villain! Lecherous, treacherous, smiling, bandy [sic], damned villain.

John: That's Hamlet. The Closet Scene.

Jeremy (furious): I know it's Hamlet. I went to Oxford! [39] (6)

The humor of the exchange results from the clash of two radically different obsessions: John is as excited to hear Shakespeare quoted as Jeremy is, like Hamlet, driven nearly mad by the thought of a beloved woman's adultery. The farce's silliness is extended by Jeremy's asserting the authority of his own academic qualifications after his rant is interrupted by John's pedantry. The ineffectualness of John's character is established elsewhere in the telescript by his responding Polonius-like to a maidservant's allusion to her "baby boy's bonny bum." "That's good," he coos; "Baby boy's bonny bum is good" (45). A servant's overly alliterative praise of her child's bottom reduces to further absurdity the pedantic Polonius's delight in the Player King's reference to the sadly "mobbled queen" (Hamlet 2.2.484).

McNally also employs allusions to Shakespeare to mark the depth of a character's emotional life. Sam Found Out, or The Queen of Mababawe (HRC 48.5), a teleplay on which McNally collaborated with his close friend and fellow playwright, Wendy Wasserstein, is a bittersweet comedy about a disguised African prince's falling in love with a down-on-her-luck New York City dance instructor. (7) The script calls attention to its outdated formula by having the aging gamine disgustedly walk out of a revival movie house's showing of a black and white film about a dance instructor who falls in love with a prince in disguise, which even the hopelessly romantic Maxine finds unrealistic. At a critical moment in the teleplay, however, Maxine's student prince draws upon the final couplet of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," to explain his feelings for her. The shallow Hollywood formula being parodied in the drama is suddenly transformed by a moment of genuine emotion. McNally's use of the sonnet allows the audience to accept the possibility that love can save one from despair. Use of the sonnet was no doubt McNally's device, rather than his collaborator's, inasmuch as Wasserstein's plays betray no particular engagement with Shakespeare, and McNally uses Shakespeare's Sonnets in a similar fashion elsewhere (see note 6, above).

In Master Class (1995), McNally puts to inventive use Giuseppe Verdi's operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Purporting to dramatize one of the master classes that soprano Maria Callas taught at Juillard in 1971, the play depends upon Callas's revisiting in soliloquy the events of her life as recordings of her arias play on the theater's sound system. Callas's most famous roles comment upon the choices she has made in her private life and on the consequences of those decisions with which she must now live: Callas damaged her voice by using it without reserve--her critics said recklessly--in her emotionally tempestuous performances. Her climactic exchange is with Sharon, a student soprano who has rehearsed Lady Macbeth's Letter Scene:

I haven't heard this music in years. Even the thought of it makes the hairs on the back of my head stand out. I guess I'm ready. Begin. [...] Satanic music, don't you think? We know where this music is coming from, don't we? What part of her body? Verdi knew his Shakespeare. (36)

Intimidated by Callas's overbearing manner, the student is unable to perform before the diva, leaving Callas to draw a lesson for the classroom observers:

This is just what I was talking about: If you're going to stand up here, naked, and let people judge you, you can't afford to have feelings like Sharon's. A performance is a struggle. You have to win. The audience is the enemy. We have to bring you to your knees because we're right. If I'm worried about what you're thinking about me, I can't win. I beg, I cringe for your favor instead. "Ho dato tutto ate." Eh? Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours. (37)

Initially the scene seems intended to demonstrate the colossal ego of Callas, who wrestled her audiences to submission night after night through sheer force of will--the very quality that allowed her to sing Lady Macbeth to such acclaim. However, after being ill in the bathroom, the student soprano returns to complete her demonstration aria and to suffer Callas's critique. During Sharon's performance, Callas cajoles her to discover the emotional significance of Shakespeare's language and Verdi's music. In the process, a kaleidoscopic patterning of fiction and actuality, of dramatic and autobiographical identity, emerges (47-60). Callas uses Lady Macbeth's response to her husband's letter--'"You would be great, but will you be wicked?' Ah, there's the question!" (48)--to emphasize how the young soprano should carry herself on stage and to dare her to take greater risks in her delivery. At the same time, McNally uses the passage to comment upon Callas's own fashioning of her career and personal life. Much as Lady Macbeth attempts to instill in her husband the courage she fears he lacks--and, even more importantly, as Callas demonstrated her own mettle in her repeated stand-offs with management and with her oftentimes antagonistic audiences--Callas dares the student to show her "balls" as a performer (51-52). And just as Lady Macbeth unsexes herself, becoming more "wicked" than her husband in order to ensure his greatness ("He's weak. She knows it. She must be strong for both of them," 48), so Callas has had to sacrifice her personal relationships in order to succeed on the stage. "Rise and rule. Rise and take your place in this world," Callas translates Verdi's appropriation of Lady Macbeth's encouragement to her husband (50). Thus, even as Callas encourages the novice soprano to seize control of the role, she recalls the courage with which she herself repeatedly faced down an opera establishment that preferred Renata Tebaldi's more traditional performance style to Callas's own. Verdi's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth allows both Callas the means to demonstrate the emotional bravura that she brought to the stage and McNally the opportunity to comment upon the tragedy that results from such intransigence, however brilliant its immediate results. "Ah, Verdi! Ah, Shakespeare! Ah, my own ambition!" Callas cries in a moment of self-recognition (56). (8)

The text by Shakespeare which proves McNally's single greatest resource is undoubtedly Hamlet. Although McNally drew upon Hamlet as early as And Things That Go Bump in the Night, the existential struggle and untimely death of Shakespeare's title hero took on additional resonance for McNally in the years from around 1985 to 1995 as he meditated upon what a playwright could do to provide audience members overwhelmed by the horror of the AIDS pandemic with a much needed catharsis. Ironically, in And Things That Go Bump in the Night, it is Ruby-a failed opera singer who, with tragic consequences, instills in her family her own fear of life--who is given to quoting Hamlet. "Oh, little more than kin and less than kind, are we this evening, I see," she rejoins to her petulant son Sigfrid (15; compare Hamlet 1.2.65). She similarly mocks the decency of her distraught father-in-law when, witnessing a tear on his cheek, she parodies Lady Macbeth: "Who would have thought the old man to have so much salt in him?" (28; compare Macbeth 5.1.33-34). The allusions to Shakespeare situate Ruby's family in that same unweeded garden overcome by "things rank and gross in nature" that so disgusts Hamlet (Hamlet 1.2.135-37); they signal Ruby's decline from the fully engaged emotional life represented by the operas in which she once performed to a defensively claustrophobic existence in which cruelty has replaced poetry. Human life, McNally observes with Shakespeare, has little value for those who are alternately ambitious and fearful.

Hamlet's words seem to come most readily to McNally's mind when he is writing characters caught in an existential crisis. For example, in The Lisbon Traviata (1985; rev. 1989), Stephen, trying to forestall the departure of his lover, seizes upon Mike's description of his feelings for the new partner with whom he plans to move in: "How 'fond'? Did you say 'fond,' madam? Nay, you love. I know not 'fond'" (75). The immediate effect of Stephen's theatrical posturing is to alienate Mike further. But Stephen's paraphrase of Hamlet's "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'" (Hamlet 1.2.76) reveals the depth of his turmoil which, like Hamlet's, "passeth show" (Hamlet 1.2.85). "Those are dark, mean, and extremely dangerous streets, right now" (85), Stephen warns Mike, drawing an implicit analogy between gay life at the height of the AIDS pandemic and the cold, dark battlements of Elsinore where one is uncertain "Who's there ?" (Hamlet 1.1.1).

Hamlet, however, also offers McNally's characters a way out of the world where '"Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart" (Hamlet 1.1.6-7). For McNally, the only stance that one can take in the face of the annihilation that AIDS presented before the advent of protease inhibitors was that modeled by the melancholy Prince of Denmark. When Horatio cautions Hamlet to resist dueling with Laertes if he suspects that the outcome of the fight has been predetermined, Hamlet replies:

Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? (Hamlet 5.2.157-61)

Similarly, when asked by his partner how he is feeling, James--a wardrobe seamstress who is suffering from complications due to full-blown AIDS-responds grandly, "We defy augury." Pressed to explain what he means by such an assertion, James replies

I don't know. It's from a Shakespearean play we did at the National. The actor who played it always tossed his head and put his hand on his hip when he said it. I think he was being brave in the face of adversity. [...] So, whenever I don't like what's coming down, I toss my head, put my hand on my hip, and say "We defy augury." (Love! 114)

In Dedication, "Mrs. McElroy" had taught Toby's high school class that Shakespeare's words communicate even without being fully understood. In James's case, no matter how little he understands its exact meaning, his employment of the phrase suggests that bravery lies in summoning whatever grace one can to accept the inevitable, however painful it may be to consider one's fast-approaching end. (9)

Finally, Shakespeare's Hamlet also provides McNally with an epitaph for the AIDS dead. "Andre's Mother" (1988) is a one-act play that was first performed as part of an evening of brief works by various authors titled Urban Blight, and later expanded to an hour-long, Emmy Award-winning television drama. At the memorial service for his lover, who has died of an AIDS-related cause, Cal tries to find a way to share his grief with his partner's mother, who had distanced herself from her son years earlier because of his homosexuality. "You should have come up [to New York] the summer he played Hamlet," Cal tells her, hoping to arouse some maternal pride in the professional accomplishments of the son with whom she had stopped communicating; "he was magnificent" (351). Unable to breach her silence, Cal finally releases the white balloon that he, like all of the mourners, has been holding. Only while watching it soar upwards is Cal able to take leave of his beloved partner, saying "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" (351; compare Hamlet 5.2.302-303). Cal's appropriation of Horatio's final words to his intimate friend and sole confidant brings to the fore the homoeroticism implicit in Shakespeare's representation of the men's relationship. Horatio's farewell to Hamlet offers Cal a powerful way of elegizing his beloved Andre, and McNally a benediction that he can bestow on all the AIDS dead.

In addition to his systemic appropriation of Shakespeare's language, McNally learned from his predecessor important lessons regarding the creation of character and the development of action. McNally is frank in acknowledging Shakespeare's influence upon his own dramaturgy. For example, when responding to the objection by gay activists that he resists identifying himself publicly as a "gay playwright" (even though he is gay and has written some of the most visible and discussed gay-themed plays of the past forty years), McNally cited Shakespeare's ability to create a character whom few audience members or readers recognize is gay simply because he is not created in the service of a particular socio-political agenda. In a newspaper article titled "Gay Theater? No, Just Life," McNally points to Hamlet's misogynistic treatment of Gertrude and Ophelia, his emotionally intense engagement with Horatio, and his "over-the-top enthusiasm for the theater and actors" as evidence of "the most stunning accomplishment of Shakespeare's entire oeuvre"--that is, "to have created a gay character who never once talks, walks or acts like our usual perception of one" (88). "No," McNally concludes, "the only thing that has made Hamlet straight is our thinking so" (88).

In terms of its sexual politics, McNally's argument is far bolder than that advanced by any of his activist critics, for Hamlet has exerted a greater fascination for centuries of theater-goers and readers than any politically correct portrait of a gay man in contemporary drama is likely to do. Similarly, in McNally's theater each character's sexuality is such an essential part of his or her nature that McNally rarely needs to identify anyone specifically as homosexual or heterosexual. Indeed, it was the casualness with which Clarence accepts his homosexuality and pursues his desire of meeting "someone in the park" that enraged professional theater critics at the opening of McNally's first Broadway production. Critics seemed to feel that they should have been warned in advance that they would be watching a "gay play," as though one would prepare differently to attend a play with a gay character than one with exclusively heterosexual ones (Frontain 52n.2).

In a fragment in the HRC McNally Archive, McNally undertakes a contemporary version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (HRC 58.1). Eight pages of dialogue among four different couples are typewritten and revised in pencil in McNally's hand on the yellow foolscap he used throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Of obvious interest to Shakespeare scholars, the fragment is untitled, as McNally's working drafts often are. Nothing in the surviving dialogue immediately suggests that McNally is adapting A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, a page of handwritten notes on yellow legal pad paper that accompanies the typescript outlines the first four scenes and enumerates the play's ten characters, correlating each with the Shakespearean character whose function he or she will subsume. The handwritten notes also contain alternate names for, and quickly jotted verbal descriptions of some of, the characters. Idle doodles at the head of the page depict a fir tree alongside a woman with a cigarette in her mouth holding in her outstretched hands the decapitated head of a male; a pair of naked female legs alongside the lower half of a mermaid, the lines of the one replicating the lines of the other; and a naked female body that has undergone a transformation of some kind.

McNally's dramatic premise is clear from the surviving fragment. Four couples, eager to escape the stifling heat of summertime Manhattan and enjoy the cooler weather on the Long Island coast, travel either by automobile or motorcycle to a Hamptons-style weekend site. The couples also seek a measure of sexual relief, several of them speaking of the advertisement for an outdoors gathering of "swinging young couples desiring to meet the same" that appeared in an alternative newspaper, and which proves the actual impetus for their venturing so far out of the city. Presumably pin spots and blackouts would have been used to direct the audience's attention from one to another of the couples as they converge upon the woodland location of their weekend.

McNally's handwritten notes indicate that Sean and Sarah, "The Liberal-Minded Couple," are kin to Shakespeare's Lysander and Hermia. They quarrel over the time that each spent in the bathroom preparing for the outing, thus hinting at the jealousy that each character in the play will feel over his or her partner's desire to have sex with other people. Demetrius and Helena have morphed into a lesbian biker couple in which insecure Mopsa (whose name recalls the shepherdess who competes with Dorcas for the love of the Clown in The Winter's Tale) struggles to please her sexually dominating and socially aggressive mate, Tamora (whose name McNally takes from the Machiavellian queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus). Theseus and Hippolyta are represented by a married couple, Thad and Gwen, who worry about the appropriateness of bringing their child with them to the weekend gathering. (They are the characters for whom the least information survives, McNally failing to describe them in his notes and breaking off just a few lines into his writing of their introductory scene.) Oberon and Titania are represented by Luke and Christopher, a gay couple who squabble because Chris's fear of being penetrated anally drives his oversexed mate to seek anonymous sexual partners in out-of-the-way public restrooms. The notes indicate that they will be at odds over Cal, "a lovely boy stolen from an Indian king." A female character named Julia--the only one for whom McNally's notes fail to specify an equivalent in Shakespeare--seems intended to serve a similarly disruptive purpose among the lesbian and heterosexual couples as Cal does for Luke and Christopher. However, her name is penciled beneath McNally's doodle of the female legs and mermaid's tail, suggesting that she will be transformed, Bottom-like, or that, mediating between different realms and species, she is herself the agent of the others' transformation.

The fragment reveals the personalities of the eight principals through the conversations that take place between each couple as they drive. In each case, squabbles over such pedestrian matters as who will walk the dog, who will attend to a fussing child, or how one's partner is dressed barely mask the sexual tensions that are the actual source of antagonism. Sean is wearing cologne and has achieved an especially close shave by using a blade rather than his usual electric razor, while his wife Sarah has oiled her body with a scented unguent after bathing at length. Each is jealous of the preparations that the other has made to appear as desirable as possible to the strangers whom they nervously look forward to meeting at the couples weekend--preparations that apparently they no longer make on each other's behalf. In all likelihood, McNally was preparing for a clash of personalities between the aggressive motorcyclist, Tamora, who enjoys making dismissive comments about gay men, and Luke who, his boyfriend complains, is highly promiscuous yet determined to maintain a "straight" appearance when in the presence of strangers, making him exactly the kind of insecure, self-conscious gay man that Tamora delights in taunting. Christopher's exasperation with Luke's insensitivity leads him to exclaim that it must be easier to be in a heterosexual relationship where the domestic duties and emotional roles are pre-determined by gender. However, his generalization is undercut by the scene's segue to Thad and Gwen, whose quarrel is interrupted by the fussing of their child in the back seat, demonstrating the difficulty that heterosexuals themselves have in deciding who is responsible for what.

McNally's handwritten notes call for the four couples to become involved in a car crash, although it is not clear whether as victims or as witnesses forced by someone else's wreck to detour off the main road into a wooded area where sexual madness will ensue. The notes suggest that a series of exchanges in a highway rest stop's Men's Room and Ladies' Room will initiate a chain of confusing sexual encounters, excitement at attending the "swinging couples" event encouraging the characters to act on their heretofore suppressed desires. Likewise, the sudden availability of multiple potential sexual partners brings into play their jealousies and insecurities vis a vis these partners.

How McNally would have resolved the sexual mayhem that unfolds in the woods is unclear from the notes. But the play shares a period sensibility with Peter Hall's 1968 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which featured Camaby Street fashions and anchored the Athens portions of the action in the 1960s youth culture; and with Peter Brook's 1970 stage production in which actors juggled and swung upon trapezes, the circus-like atmosphere representing the tumult of love and desire. Likewise, conceptually the fragment resembles McNally's own one-act play "Noon" (presented as part of a trilogy titled Morning, Noon and Night on which McNally collaborated with Leonard Melfi and Israel Horovitz at Circle in the Square Theater in November 1968), in which five people descend upon a vacant apartment in response to a personal ad in an alternative newspaper promising "groovy sex" (35) of various kinds. The farce in "Noon" depends upon the characters' mismatched sexual desires, no one person proving able to satisfy, or be satisfied by, any other.

McNally apparently began adapting A Midsummer Night's Dream as a way of commenting upon the 1960s-70s Sexual Revolution, Shakespeare authorizing a satiric examination of contemporary sexual mayhem. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the first pair of lovers escapes to the Forest of Athens to evade the legal strictures that hold in the city, and the others follow them in the pursuit of each person's own heart's desire; the play dramatizes, in part, a conflict between duty and desire. The dream of gratification turns into a nightmare as the couples fall victim to what Titania calls "the forgeries of jealousy" (MND 2.1.81). Ultimately, the lovers learn how to accept the "mortal grossness" of one's partner (MND 3.1.142), their feelings eventually growing "to something of great constancy" (5.1.26). Similarly, in McNally's project tensions in the couples' relationships are exacerbated as they escape the strictures of the city and of their various domestic routines, only to learn more about themselves, their partners, and their desires than they initially may have cared to know. Presumably, McNally's play would have concluded with the members of each couple renewing their commitment to one another.

The critical attention received by Hall's film and Brook's stage production may have preempted McNally's completing his play. The former aired on CBS television, albeit with Judi Dench's near-nude performance as Titania carefully edited. The latter achieved legendary status in theater circles and went on a world tour, making it one of the most visible and hotly debated Shakespeare productions of the decade. Both productions were praised for the ingenuity with which they appropriated Shakespeare to comment upon the welcome liberation--and nightmare-of the so-called "Swinging Sixties." It may have proven impossible for McNally not to feel that he was riding a wave rather than initiating one.

McNally did, however, find alternate opportunities to comment upon the period's frenetic pursuit of sexual gratification. In Bad Habits (1974), sexual dysfunctions are treated at a pair of mental institutions. At Ravenswood patients are encouraged to indulge their whims, while at Dunelawn they are trained to repress them as strictly as possible. McNally's satire illustrates the inefficacy of either extreme. The Ritz (1975) similarly skewers the period's bringing of sexual desire so openly into the public arena, the play satirizing such extreme but ultimately innocuous manifestations of sexual desire as "chubby chasing," Crisco-facilitated "fisting," and steam room orgies. Significantly, in Love! Valour! Compassion! McNally adapted the fragment's exposition device of multiple couples journeying independently of each other to a country house where new relationships will form while old ones unravel, and where a rural retreat takes on an almost magical aura coming after the work-week frustrations suffered in the city by the house party guests, suggesting a connection between the play and A Midsummer Night's Dream that few readers imagine.

Too often influence studies depend upon a possible verbal echo or a plausible analogy that, while provocative, cannot be fully substantiated. The HRC archive of McNally's papers not only permits an authoritative documentation of what many influence studies lack but brings into sharp relief Shakespeare's continuing presence on the modern stage. The material illuminates three ways in which McNally was encouraged by Shakespeare's example to consider the purpose and operations of theater, Shakespeare offering him an appealing alternative to the expressionism and absurdism that dominated the American stage as McNally began writing. (10)

McNally is most engaged by the essential humanity of Shakespeare's imagined universe. "Shakespeare respected words! And you know why? Because Shakespeare respected people!," Grandfa protests angrily after hearing Ruby's latest Message to the World (And Things 14). "It's criminal how you abuse the gift of speech, woman, criminal!" (15). In play after play McNally dramatizes the difficulty that people have communicating with each other, but in McNally's world such failed attempts humanize, rather than dehumanize, a character for the audience. Although McNally's earliest plays betray something of the absurdism of his mentor and one-time partner, Edward Albee, his characters never withdraw into verbal games but confront each other directly, demanding their humanity be recognized even in an absurdist world: "You know I am not simply the sum total of my parts. I am someone" (79), Marion Cheever protests to an implacable army induction physician in Next (1969). By all evidence, McNally's dislike of irony stems from a resentment of anyone using language as a defensive measure- -which may explain why his 1991 collaboration with uber-ironist Stephen Sondheim came to naught. (11) He prefers, rather, the Shakespearean use of language as the means of accessing interiority: Language reveals a character's most deeply rooted desires

and anxieties, enjoining the audience (as Grandfa insists) to respect that character's humanity.

Additionally, McNally has been influenced by the performance style demanded by Shakespeare's plays. In Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971), McNally uses Hamlet's advice to the players to satirize the mumbling of Method-trained stage actors like Marion Brando and Montgomery Clift. Crashing an audition for Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre's "Salute to Polish Expressionism season," puckish Tommy begins his audition with an "insane inarticulate howl" of "Aaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!" that is at odds with the requirements for clear diction and restrained gestures that Hamlet imposes on the players in the speech that Tommy then performs:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me--(Tommy Flowers 86)

Tommy's audition is cut short at this point by the director, as though the avant garde performance style that the Beaumont is looking to promote necessarily precludes the natural delivery style proposed by Shakespeare. Hamlet's words to the players, however, serve as McNally's own apologia for a performance style that seeks to communicate as clearly as possible and, in the process, "beget[s] a temperance" within the audience that comes of accepting a character's humanity as opposed to being distracted by an actor's affected diction and overly emphatic hand gestures.

Finally, to return to Katharine's speech in A Perfect Ganesh with which this essay opens, throughout his career McNally has been influenced by Shakespeare's "muse of fire" that enables the audience to "ascend / The brightest heaven of invention" (Henry V Prologue 1-2). In particular, he has been influenced by Shakespeare's recognition that it is impossible for actors "On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth / So great an object" (10-11) without relying upon the audience's "imaginary forces" (18). In A Perfect Ganesh, the Hindu god, in the guise of a village puppet master, explains that "In India we participate in theatre. We don't sit back, arms folded and say 'Show me'" (87). In this context, Ganesh might himself have quoted Shakespeare's Prologue, arguing that in order to provide a deeply personal kind of engagement, theater must call upon the audience to participate in the production rather than sit behind that invisible fourth wall and passively observe the play's action. For Shakespeare, as for McNally, the audience must be called upon actively to use its imagination.

Shakespeare's "wooden O," thus, proves an authoritative model for McNally's own theater. McNally's plays oftentimes call for a realistic set (a Hell's Kitchen studio apartment in Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, the Fire Island pool deck and house interior in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, or the lower west side rooftop, complete with water tower and fire escape, in Unusual Acts of Devotion). But a significant number of McNally's mature plays--A Perfect Ganesh, Love! Valour! Compassion!, Ragtime, Corpus Christi, A Man of No Importance, Some Men--call explicitly for the absence of sets and props, and/or for actors to double in parts with only a perfunctory change of costume, thus insisting that the audience actively participate in the production by using its imagination. (12) A Perfect Ganesh, for example, specifies a totally white set, the wonder experienced by tourists at the Taj Mahal being indicated by the facial expressions of the actors rather than by an elaborate set or backdrop; the audience is left to imagine the actual site that inspires such awe. Similarly, Love! Valour! Compassion! parodies the absence of a realistic set by asking for a miniature model of Gregory's house to sit on stage in the opening scene.

Two of McNally's most recent plays address directly the power of "imaginary forces." A Man of No Importance takes place in a church basement where an amateur troop rehearses Oscar Wilde's Salome; as the action progresses, Herod's beheading of John the Baptist doubles first as the Marquess of Queensberry's prosecution of Wilde, and then as the president of the parish Sodality's challenging the performance on church property of a play that he considers to be obscene. This overlapping of characters and actions is made possible by the absence of a realistic set, and the play's success depends upon the audience's being able to process three overlapping levels of action and meaning.

Similarly, Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, whose title comes in part from Prospero's speech closing the Masque of Ceres (The Tempest 4.1.156-57), takes place on the empty stage of a dilapidated theater that a children's theater director hopes to secure for his company. Mrs. Willard, the crabbed, terminally ill property owner, proves an unlikely, but nonetheless effective, Prospero. The very space of the action (an empty, long disused stage) allows for neither props nor costumes, the actors entering the stage of the shuttered theater in their supposed street clothes. Excited to discover off stage a hand-turned wind machine such as Shakespeare's company might have used, McNally's "actors" comment upon how such a piece of equipment fosters a collaboration between the actor's mimetic skill and the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. Like David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre (1975), McNally's Dedication considers how the artifice of acting comments upon the artifice of living, and vice versa. But unlike Mamet's characters, McNally's principals do not try to upstage each other, defining oneself at the expense of one another, theater thus proving a metaphor for the violence of human existence. Rather, McNally's characters use theater to exorcize inner demons and to help each other to achieve self-acceptance. McNally's Dedication is an apologia for an elemental theater that, like Shakespeare's, relies heavily upon its audience's imagination.

Thus, as it has evolved McNally's theater has been stripped to the primal, Shakespearean elements of language and character. Rejecting the use of realistic sets and special effects, McNally has increasingly required more of his audience imaginatively. Through Shakespeare--and through the teachers of Shakespeare who had such an impact on him--McNally discovered the power of an unworthy scaffold that nonetheless brings forth the highest heaven of invention.

Works Cited

Alperson, Myra. "Terrence McNally '60, Playwright." Columbia College Today 13.2 (Spring 1986): 63. Print.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean. "McNally and Steinbeck." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 21.4 (Fall 2008): 46-54. Print.

Goldman, Michael. Telephone Interview. 23 January 2009.

Kaulbach, Ernest. "Maurine McElroy Resolution." Office of the Graduate Dean, University of Texas at Austin, 2005.

Ledford, Larry S. "Terrence McNally: Scripts Together, Worlds Apart." Stages Nov./Dec. 1991: 4-5. Print.

McNally, Terrence. "Andre's Mother." Fifteen Short Plays. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1994.347-51. Print.

--. And Things That Go Bump in the Night. Collected Plays, Volume II. Lyme, NH: Smith and Krauss, 1996. 1-78. Print.

--. Corpus Christi. New York: Grove, 1998. Print.

--. Dedication or The Stuff of Life. New York: Grove, 2006. Print.

--. "Edited transcript of the Times Auditorium event held on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 1994." Copyright NY Times Co. McNally Archive 58.2. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin.

--. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Three Plays by Terrence McNally. New York: Plume, 1990. 89-156. Print.

-- "Gay Theater? No, Just Life." L A Times Calendar 8 Dec. 1996: 3, 88. Print.

-- Golden Age. John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts rehearsal script. 3 March 2010. Unpublished TS. Terrence McNally.

--. It's Only a Play. Three Plays by Terrence McNally. New York: Plume, 1990. 157-241. Print.

--. The Lisbon Traviata. Three Plays by Terrence McNally. New York: Plume, 1990. 1-88. Print.

--. Love! Valour! Compassion! Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre, 1995. Print.

--. Master Class. New York: Plume, 1995. Print.

--. Next. Fifteen Short Plays. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1994. 61-81. Print.

--. Noon. Fifteen Short Plays. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1994. 23-50. Print.

--. A Perfect Ganesh. Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre, 1993. Print.

--. Some Men. New York: Dramatists' Play Service, 2008. Print.

--. "Teachers Break." The 24 Hour Plays Project Rehearsal Draft. 17 November 2008. Unpublished TS. Terrence McNally.

--. Unusual Acts of Devotion. Philadelphia Theatre Company Rehearsal Draft. 31 October 2008. Unpublished TS. Terrence McNally.

--. Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? Collected Plays, Volume II. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996. 79-165. Print.

Myers, Larry. "Author, Author!" Theater Week 17-23 Aug. 1987: 32-34. Print.

Ronan, Clifford. "In Celebration of Past-President Maurine McElroy." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 33.1 (Summer 2007): 161-62. Print.

Rosen, Carol. "Terrence McNally: the Theater Week Interview." Theater Week (27 Feb.-5 Mar. 1995): 12-24. Print.

Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.

Tayler, Edward W. Telephone Interview. 21 October 2008.

Notes

An SCMLA-Mellon Foundation Fellowship offered by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (HRC) allowed me to spend summer 2008 examining the contents of the sixty-two boxes thus far catalogued in the McNally Archive. Reference to McNally's unpublished papers, which are on deposit in the Archive, is to box and folder number. All quotations of Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, except as the quotations appear within McNally's plays. As an aid to readers unfamiliar with McNally's chronology, the date of the first New York or professional production of a McNally play is provided parenthetically following its first mention.

(1) In Dedication, theater owner Mrs. Willard explains why cloudcars (a stage machine in which gods descended from the heavens to earth) are no longer used on the stage: "Modern theatre began with Shakespeare. I know when people say it began but they're wrong. Shakespeare put real people on the stage. [...] He didn't need gods and spirits. He trafficked in mere humanity. Cloudcars have been in mothballs ever since" (52). Mrs. Willard's praise of Shakespeare is all the more impressive because she is generally so cynical and cantankerous.

(2) At W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, Texas, McNally was included in the small circle of students whom Maureen McElroy invited after school to her home, where they recited poetry, listened to music, and discussed ideas rarely broached at social gatherings in conservative 1950s east Texas. McElroy's three-year tenure at the school fortuitously coincided with McNally's sophomore, junior, and senior years. Not long after he graduated, the forty-seven year old McElroy left Corpus Christi to pursue a doctorate in English Renaissance studies at the University of Texas in Austin, whose faculty she would subsequently join, and where she would remain (in her later years as the English department's undergraduate advisor) until she retired in 1998 at age 85. A resolution in her honor was passed by the Faculty Senate celebrating her extraordinary career as teacher and adviser (Kaulbach). Among her accomplishments, McElroy served in 1976-77 as president of the South-Central Renaissance Conference. McNally stayed in touch with "Mrs. Mac," as he continued to address her, inviting her to New York for openings of his plays, and dedicating to her both Apple Pie (1968) and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987). In October 1998, when asked to deliver the keynote address at the Forty-Eighth Annual Conference of the New York State English Council (a professional society of secondary school English teachers), McNally insisted that his own high school mentor share the stage with him, where she commented that although McNally was the youngest member of her select group of extracurricular students, he was the most eager and in some ways the most sophisticated. Following her death in 2005, McNally supplied the epitaph carved on her tombstone: "Not just an English Teacher but a Life Teacher" (Ronan 162). On November 3, 2008, surrounded by luminaries of the New York theater world who had gathered to celebrate his seventieth birthday with the unveiling of his portrait at Sardi's restaurant, McNally again paid tribute to his high school mentor, claiming that in some way or another "I acknowledge her in every play I've written."

The nature of the encouragement that McElroy provided the adolescent McNally is indicated by one of the comments that she wrote on a school paper that survives in the McNally Archive: "Keep always the freshness of your viewpoint, the honesty of your convictions. Your integrity is your armour" (HRC 57.4). There also survives in the McNally Archive his term paper for his senior English class. Dated December 16, 1955, and titled "Let There Be Music," the essay references Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale before analyzing how Shakespeare uses music--specifically, Ophelia's mad song in Hamlet, and both Iago's drinking song and Desdemona's mother's maid's song in Othello--to create mood and vary the emotional color of his plays. The essay is remarkably sophisticated for a seventeen-year-old writer and anticipates McNally's use of music, particularly opera, in his straight plays, as well as the ease with which he collaborates with composers and lyricists on musicals. McNally appropriated the title of his 1999 libretto, The Food of Love-.a poignant one-act opera, with music by Robert Beaser, about a homeless woman trying to find succor for her starving baby--from the opening line of Twelfth Night.

(3) In Corpus Christi, a defiant Joshua petulantly boasts that "Mrs. McElroy" has taught him that Corpus Christi, McNally's own hometown, "is the armpit of Western civilization" (26). Similarly, in Some Men (2007), when a young man is asked how he got "to Columbia all the way from Texas," he explains: "I had a fantastic high school English teacher. I went from my graduation directly to the Greyhound bus station" (12).

(4) McNally's indebtedness to Andrew Chiappe brings into relief another chapter in American Shakespeare pedagogy. Chiappe succeeded Mark Van DOren as the instructor of what was at mid-century one of the most popular undergraduate courses at Columbia. According to Edward W. Tayler (who eventually assumed responsibility for the course), Van Doren established the custom of doing all of Shakespeare's plays in order of composition over two semesters of study. Chiappe was a charismatic figure whose lectures attracted well over 100 students every term. Indeed, Chiappe's course was so popular that he was the only member of the English department to be assigned a graduate assistant to grade student work. The course influenced the study and production of Shakespeare far beyond the Columbia campus. Van Doren's lectures were collected in his oft-reprinted Shakespeare (1939). Among his students were poet John Berryman and publisher Robert Giroux, both of whom acknowledged the example of Van Doren in their published writings on Shakespeare. Although Chiappe never published more than a book review on Shakespeare, his students included a number of distinguished future academics, like Steven Orgel, Howard Felperin, Morris Dickstein, and John Hollander, as well as Michael P. Kahn, who would become the artistic director of the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C. (and who, coincidentally, directed the Varsity Show at Columbia during McNally's senior year, which McNally authored in collaboration with Edward L. Kleban, who would go on to write the lyrics for A Chorus Line). Likewise, Chiappe served as a consultant to his former student, publisher Jason Epstein, and encouraged the latter to publish Derek Traversi's influential two-volume An Approach to Shakespeare. After Chiappe died suddenly of a heart attack at age 52 while spending his 1966-67 sabbatical year in Paris, such luminaries of the English department as Lionel Trilling and Frederick Dupee attempted to teach the course, but neither was able to duplicate Chiappe's success.

Michael Goldman, who would become professor of Shakespeare studies at Princeton University, served as Chiappe's grader while a student at Columbia. He describes Chiappe's lectures as "stocked with insight, giving the impression that he seemed to be working out his own ideas as he lectured and making the students feel that they were in the presence of a wonderful critical mind." The lectures were "thrilling performances," delivered in "a rich, mellifluous voice" and characterized by "an ever present gift of phrase." Influenced by G. Wilson Knight's studies of Shakespeare's imagery and language, Chiappe encouraged students to consider the ways in which "the plays develop Shakespeare's vision of life."

I am grateful to Columbia University professor emeritus Edward W. Tayler and Princeton University professor emeritus Michael Goldman for sharing with me their recollections of Chiappe in telephone conversations.

(5) The director's description of his staging of the play also proves to be McNally's satirical comment on theater productions which traduce Shakespeare's text--in particular its most important feature, its language--in order to exhibit the resourcefulness of the director. In Dedication, theater manager-actor Lou Nuncle voices a similar contempt for directorial innovations while he rages against the inaccessibility of most contemporary American productions of Shakespeare:

I hate Shakespeare. I don't know anyone who's honest who doesn't. In the first place, there's too many words. He said so himself: "Words, words, words." And what are they talking about? "Speak English," I want to yell at the actors. No, instead you get yada yada yada in iambic pentameter for six and a half hours. And the plots! People getting murdered because they lost a handkerchief. Women playing men and no one notices. "What's with the high voice, buddy? And what are those, pray tell, oh shepherd youth? Look like hooters to me." The plays are so confusing people don't even know what period to set them in. The Scottish Play on the North Pole in 3005--I'm sorry, I'm very confused. I don't deny Shakespeare wrote a lot of great lines. "To be or not to be." "Et tu, Brute?" "Let's kill all the lawyers." It's just the goddamn plays you have to sit through to get to them! King Lear or Dumbo, there's no contest. (22)

In Dedication, however, Lou's involvement with children's theater is a sign of his sexual and emotional immaturity, which may explain his professed distaste for Shakespeare. Needless to say, McNally has on numerous occasions expressed his own high regard for Shakespeare's play. "My favorite thing man has made is King Lear. I think it's the most perfect expression of who we are. Personally, I would put it ahead of a symphony of Mozart [...], or the Taj Mahal, or the dome of St. Peter's" (Rosen 18-19). Others of McNally's characters agree. For example, in Golden Age (2010), LaBlanche asserts, "King Lear is the greatest achievement of the human mind" (19).

(6) "O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!" (Ham/et 1.5.106). Clearly, Hamlet's line does not come from the Closet Scene, as John asserts. McNally's mistaken attribution may be a coy suggestion that John is a "closeted" character--that is, a homosexual who does not openly acknowledge his orientation. It is more likely, however, that McNally's habit is to supply quotations from memory as he is composing, and only later--should time permit--check them against a printed copy of Shakespeare's works. For example, in Corpus Christi "Mrs. McElroy" begins the opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, "Th'expense of spirit," which Joshua completes, commenting brusquely "I already know it" (Corpus 27). The sonnet allows an important insight into Joshua's development, suggesting that he is already familiar with the wearisome and demeaning aspects of lust, as well as anticipates his subsequent rejections of Judas's increasingly possessive sexual overtures. "Mrs. McElroy," however, misidentifies the poem as "Sonnet Sixty-four," a peculiar lapse on the part of a character standing in for McNally's own beloved and highly accomplished mentor. And the inaccurate citation must be considered a lapse. For whereas Sonnet 129 comments directly upon Joshua's negotiation of the perils of lust--and Judas's failure to do so--there is no thematic reason for McNally to direct the audience's or reader's attention to Sonnet 64 at this point, or at any subsequent point, in the play.

Significantly, the first computer-scripted draft of the play on deposit in the HRC reveals that McNally initially typed "Sonnet xxx," as though intending to supply the proper sonnet number later. He failed to do so, the generic place marker remaining in subsequent computer-scripted drafts. However, in the rehearsal script used for the play's original production at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the sonnet's number was moved into capital letters, as though the sonnet was being formally titled by a Roman numeral. Only when the copyeditor for Grove Press insisted on spelling out the Roman numeral was "Sixty-four" substituted for "xxx" or "XXX." McNally's hand does not appear on the copy of the Grove Press copyedited pages deposited in his archive, suggesting that he may not have looked closely at the copyeditor's emendations. Thus, it is unclear if the substitution of "Sonnet Sixty-four" was done at his direction or without his knowledge.

In a short play titled "Teachers Break" that is set in a high school teachers' lounge, McNally misidentifies Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," as Sonnet 26 (7). The play, which was performed at a benefit in New York City on 17 November 2008, starred Cynthia Nixon, Maura Tierney, Jason Butler Harner, and Justin Long as a group of English teachers who bandy about references to Beowulf, Joyce and Milton as well as Shakespeare. Its final moment depends upon the audience's appreciation of the absurdity of Shakespeare's stage direction in The Winter's Tale, "Exit, pursued by a bear" (3.3.57).

(7) Sam Found Out, or The Queen of Mababawe was the middle play in a trilogy broadcast on ABC on 31 May 1988 under the title Sam Found Out: A Triple Play. Each unit starred Liza Minelli opposite a male guest star. (The Prince of Mababawe was played by Lou Gossett, Jr.) The other segments were scripted by Lanford Wilson, and by John Kander and Fred Ebb.

(8) Callas's cry of recognition elevates her to tragic heroism, her ambition proving to have been as empowering yet self-destructive as that of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, making her the most engaging of McNally's "overreachers."

One of the most moving uses of Shakespeare occurs in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, where Johnny's reading of Shakespeare is a way of investing his life with a significance that he feels it lacks. Johnny's employment of quotations from Hamlet (118, 122, 135), Julius Caesar (135), and Twelfth Night (138) as conversational gambits signals his attempt to broaden his life emotionally and redeem an otherwise stultifying existence. In some ways, Johnny's reliance upon Shakespeare in the attempt to fashion a more satisfying life mirrors the experience that first reading Shakespeare provided the adolescent McNally.

(9) Bobby, the blind lover of Gregory at whose house the eight men gather, is associated with Hamlet as well. Early in the play, the ever critical John asks "What kind of statement about his work do you think a choreographer is making by living with a blind person?" (22). Later, however, Perry and Arthur question Bobby how he pictures Gregory. "I know what he really looks like. He's handsome. His eyes shine. He has wonderful blond hair" (31). Challenged how he can imagine color when he's been blind since birth, Bobby answers wryly, "In my mind's eye, I do, Horatio" (31). The exchange focuses the play's theme of how one is redeemed by the gaze of one's lover and, as shall be discussed below, McNally's concern with the powers of the imagination. Later, Bobby surprises their house guests by being able to identify the garden flowers by smell: "Sweet William. It's Sweet William. And this one is rue. Bitter. Very bitter. Buzz says I would make a great Ophelia if I wouldn't fall off the stage" as he has done once previously (105).

Similarly, in Unusual Acts of Devotion (2008), a recently produced but yet unpublished play, the love starved Chick jokingly attempts to seduce his straight neighbor with talk of his own death: "To take my last breath in the arms of a passionate Italian! 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!" (11, compare Hamlet 3.1.65-66). The play, which deals with the difficulty that people have escaping the prison of the self and talking honestly with others, opens with a comic exchange concerning the nature of Shakespearean soliloquy. I am grateful to Mr. McNally for making available to me the script as it was played in Philadelphia in October 2008, but which is still a work-in-progress.

(10) Annette Saddik describes the European-influenced theater that dominated the American stage during McNally's decades of greatest productivity: "Fragmented narrative as opposed to seamless narrative plot, the deconstruction of character, an acknowledgement [sic] of popular and mass culture, and a self-consciousness of performance marked by a type of drama that had been increasingly influenced by the theories of Brecht and Artaud and by the theatrical innovations of the 1960s" (129).

(11) McNally discusses the collaboration in a letter dated 25 March 1991 to Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassain (HRC Disk 45a). McNally's refusal to associate his characters with political stances is most evident in Deuce, in which two long-retired tennis doubles players touch upon a number of socially controversial topics while reunited to watch a game. It is impossible to associate either woman with a particular set of values, making the play into a social debate. Rather, the play focuses upon the ways in which the women overcome their differences and find a way to communicate with each other.

(12) The later McNally's commitment to a set-less stage is so strong that he supplies as an epigraph for the published text of Corpus Christi Kostya's description in Chekhov's The Seagull of nature as his stage and the moon as his lighting (Corpus Christi xiii).