"Allow, Accept, Be": Terrence Mcnally's engagement with Hindu spirituality in A Perfect Ganesh.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean

"Indian identity stresses that surrender to greater powers is better than individual effort and that a person becomes his true self as he enters into the living stream, naturally and un-self-consciously, of the community life and its traditions" observes Jeffrey Paine in his study of how encounters with Indian culture transformed the modern West. (1) Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh (1993) climaxes as two upper-middleclass American women on holiday in India are piloted down the Ganges to Varanasi, Hinduism's sacred city of the dead. Their fragile skiff bumps against the remains of various animals and, more disconcertingly, human corpses, splashing Margaret and Katharine with water that the former fears will contaminate them, but which actually signifies a purging of their taint from "individual effort" and inconsolable grief, fleeing them in the next scene to enter into the earthly paradise of the Taj Mahal. Their encounter with India forces the two Americans to grow to respect both the fullness of the life cycle (which includes death as well as life) and the rich complexity of humanity (which includes dark skin as well as light, and homosexuals as well as heterosexuals). As Margaret and Katharine learn through their often disconcerting but, finally, transcendent journey across India, "We all have a place here. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Allow. Accept. Be." (2)

A Perfect Ganesh is the final entry in an informal triptych of plays in which McNally addresses both the fear of difference that renders life-sustaining intimacy impossible and, more specifically (albeit less directly), the inhumanity manifested in 1980s and early 1990s America toward victims of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), an ambivalently named heterosexual couple, each of whom has been damaged by a failed past relationship, struggles to connect in the course of a sexually passionate and emotionally complex night-long encounter. When Johnny reassuringly sucks the blood flowing from Frankie's cut finger--a horrifying act at a time when Americans had only recently become aware of how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids--a predominantly heterosexual audience, viewing the development of a heterosexual romance, was forced to confront the fear of infection that builds walls between people who, paradoxically, are in the more desperate need of comfort for all their self-imposed, defensive isolation. Similarly, in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), two married heterosexual couples spend the Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island house that one of the women has inherited from a gay brother who recently died of an AIDS-related illness. Their fear of using his swimming pool lest they catch the virus which killed him, unspoken for most of the play, bespeaks a paranoia about sexual difference that infects even the most intimate of relationships. In addition to providing the only homosexual characters actually to appear onstage in the triptych, A Perfect Ganesh offers a vision of an alternative socioreligious system in which the emotionally wounded and physically damaged are ministered to by a god who, unbeknownst to them, moves in their midst to help them overcome the obstacles to intimacy that they themselves have created. The play, in short, suggests how sexual and racial differences must be accepted as a part of life if one is to live fully and religiously.

McNally makes this statement through the figure of Ganesh, a god who, himself part human and part animal (an elephant-headed man riding atop a mouse or rat), symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites and who, in Hinduism, is both the creator and the remover of obstacles. The popularity of Ganesh across India offers McNally the means of dramatizing an acceptance and, even, celebration of difference that makes for a more religiously satisfying existence. In the face of an American Judeo-Christianity that, historically, has been ambivalent about and, at times, deeply intolerant of sexual difference, McNally turns to Hinduism for an alternative religious model of how people can overcome the related obstacles of racial prejudice and homophobia, the latter dramatically brought to the surface of American life in the 1980s by the spread of AIDS. In the process, he borrows from classical Sanskrit theater a model for how a play can engage his audience emotionally even while transforming it spiritually.

I. Wild, Uncontainable Animal Sounds

One of the most distinctive features of McNally's theater is the frequency with which the tragic intrudes so unexpectedly in human lives, and with such devastating consequences. McNally's libretto for Dead Man Walking offers a striking example. The opera opens as two teenaged lovers emerge naked from a country lake on a quiet summer night and begin to make love on the blanket that they have spread on the ground. The ominous glow of a lighted cigarette in the darkness to the side of the stage alerts the audience to impending danger. Suddenly, without any warning to the lovers, who are identified only as Boy and Girl, the couple is set upon by two strangers. The struggling boy is shot in the head, and the girl's throat is slit after she has been brutally raped by both assailants. McNally's stage direction emphasizes that initially the boy and girl "are unafraid and very at ease with each other," the naked, unselfconscious beauty of the young lovers destroyed before the audience's eyes by the bloody onslaught, and the peace of the pastoral scene shattered by an act of violence that concludes only with the girl's scream. The latter is described in the stage direction as "a horrible, unforgettable, unbearable sound which is only ended when Joseph [one of the assailants] reaches into his back pocket for a knife and plunges it into her throat." (3) The scene is made the more unsettling to the audience by the fact that the girl's scream is the first human sound voiced by any of the performers onstage. (4) The audience attending the opera's premiere could not have been prepared, either emotionally or dramatically, for so violent a disruption of the playfulness and joy of young love, the audience's experience of revulsion and stunned incomprehension mirroring the boy and girl's inability to process intellectually the horror being perpetrated upon them.

"Oh, children, children, such perils await you, such pain, and no one to protect you," Sally blurts out to her young niece and nephew, distraught after witnessing the young man drown in Lips Together, Teeth Apart. (5) However, all anyone wants to know, her sister-in-law Chloe counsels, is "[t]hat they're loved. That they're safe." (6) Sally and Chloe's exchange throws into relief a recurring theme in McNally's canon: a parent's inability or, on occasion, unwillingness to protect her child from the experience of loss or of threatened destruction. In And Things That Go Bump in the Night, McNally's first commercially produced play, Ruby attempts to immure herself and her children from the predations of some unseen yet terrifying "Dread" by installing the family in a bunker where, the text implies, their fear is so powerful that it eventually destroys them. Conversely, in "Andre's Mother" a woman's inability to accept her son's homosexuality leaves her a silent witness to his life at the memorial service held after he has died of an AIDS-related illness, the only emotion that she displays being a silent convulsion of grief at play's end as she releases into the sky the white balloon that symbolizes his spirit's sojourn on earth. Likewise, in Corpus Christi, Joshua's mother is not a traditional Madonna depicted lovingly holding her infant son in her arms, but a woman who is unable to understand, much less appreciate, her son's religious and sexual difference, and consequently who is unable to comfort him when he is brutalized by a hostile world.

A Perfect Ganesh proves McNally's most powerful orchestration of this larger theme of the threat of sudden, violent death, as well as the more specific action of a mother's failure to keep her child safe. The larger action is represented by an episode that Katharine recalls from a vacation that she, Margaret, and their husbands took years earlier in the Caribbean: We were swimming in front of the hotel. A small, single-engine place had taken off from the airport. The engine kept stalling. No one [on the beach] moved. It was terrifying. That little plane just floating there. No sound. No sound at all. Like a kite without a string, without a wind. I don't think I've ever felt so helpless .... Finally, I guess the pilot made the necessary adjustments, the engine caught and stayed caught and the little plane flew away without a worry in the world, as if nothing had happened, and we finished swimming and played tennis. (17) (7)

An idle, pleasure-filled moment is suddenly disrupted, as in Dead Man Walking, by a "horrible, unforgettable, unbearable sound," except that in this case it is the ominous sound of silence made by the plane's stalled engine. Such disruptions occur repeatedly in the play, as when Margaret recalls how, on that same Caribbean vacation, her husband "nearly died" from food poisoning (17), the casualness with which she recalls the event and then allows the conversation to flow back in its original direction mirroring the way that the vacationers on the beach return to their idle sport once the plane's emergency overhead has passed.

On Margaret and Katharine's trip to India, Margaret produces a similar effect on a Japanese tourist in the adjoining hotel room who hears through the connecting bathroom vent Margaret's quiet gasp as, undressing for bed, she discovers a lump in her breast ("'Oh!', you went, just 'oh!'" [49]). More dramatic is Ganesh's interruption of the play's action in India to report: And so it happened that while Margaret Civil and Katharine Brynne stared with heavy, sad, sad eyes at what Mr. Ray of India Rail injudiciously called the most beautiful scenery in India, some 8,345 miles away, at 11:20 P.M. their time, George Brynne, Katharine Brynne's husband, Caucasian male, aged 62, lost control of his car on a patch of something called glare ice on his way home from a movie Katharine had refused to see because of its purported violence (she was right! an appalling motion picture it was too!), went into a skid and slammed into a 300-year-old oak tree. He died instantly. (85)

Like a police report, Ganesh's matter-of-fact statement of George's vital statistics, the time and place of the accident, and even the age of the oak tree against which he crashed his car comes close to draining the tragedy of all emotion, making George's death seem thus the more inevitable. Ganesh interpolates a personal note in his narrative only when commenting in an aside upon the most trivial element of his report, the "appalling" amount of violence in the film that George unwittingly risked his life to see--as though life were not violent enough.

Despite the number of episodes of significant loss in A Perfect Ganesh, the anxiety resulting from a threat of violent, sudden death is anchored most firmly in a series of mother-son relationships. Both Katharine and Margaret reveal in the course of their travel through India that among their griefs each has suffered the sudden, debilitating loss of a child. The wound is more recent for Katharine, whose adult gay son, Walter, was murdered late at night on a deserted street three years earlier by a group of six African-American males who entered the neighborhood looking for a gay man to attack. Katharine is able only to verbalize to her traveling companion her agony that none of her son's murderers was found guilty at trial. The audience is allowed to see, however, that privately she is wracked with guilt over never having accepted her favorite child's homosexuality and over having been denied the possibility of reconciling with him before his death in a hospital emergency room. She is a would-be Pieta, whose discomfort with his sexual orientation denied her the chance to clasp her son's corpse to her bosom.

In the play's fluid mixing of realism and fantasy, and of past and present, Walter appears to his mother at various moments in the action. His conversations with her mark her progress from guilt to repentance of her bigotry, and finally to acceptance of racial and sexual difference. Rejecting Ganesh's assurance that his mother did indeed love him, Walter protests Katharine's emotional reserve: She should have loved me not just for falling down and scraping my knee when I was a little boy, but for standing tall when I was a young man and telling her I loved other men. She should have loved me when my heart was breaking for the love of them. She should have loved me when I wanted to tell her my heart was finally, forever full with someone--Jonathan!--but I didn't dare. She should have loved me the most when he was gone, that terrible day when my life was over. (24)

So completely does Walter feel that he has been failed by his mother that when Katharine rages over the racial identity of his murderers--"Black! All of them black!"--he fires back, "No, mother! All of them you!" (25). His mother's disdain for homosexuality--her inability to accept that two men could share a home together (24)--proves as hurtful to him, if not more so, as the mortal blows struck physically by his attackers.

The end result of Katharine's inability to love her son as he was, rather than as she wanted him to be, is that, devastated by the loss of him, she travels to India to "heal" (45). Recognizing on some level the damage that her prejudice has inflicted on others as well as on herself, she begins her journey listening to a self-help tape that instructs her how to will herself into becoming a more loving and gracious person: "I choose to be happy. I choose to be loving. I choose to be good" (24). Her inability to accept what she considers to be imperfection in others is reflected during their travel by her search for the "perfect" Ganesh figurine of the play's title that she hopes to bring home as a souvenir. She must learn that "they're all perfect" (106), not as the incarnation of an ideal, but each as its own unique self--a lesson that she must learn about her son, Walter, as well.

Margaret's loss is more distant than Katharine's, but her grief proves the more insidious both because of her social class's reticence to express emotion and because her loss has been kept private for so many years. Yet on the night of their arrival in India, she impulsively tells the story of her defiant four-year-old son Gabriel's accidental death more than thirty years earlier to a sympathetic Japanese tourist standing on a balcony adjoining Margaret and Katharine's. I'd just bought him a Good Humor bar .... His little face was covered with chocolate. I took a handkerchief out of my purse and wetted it with my tongue to clean his face. He pulled away from me. "No!" I pulled him back. "Yes!" Our eyes met. He looked at me with such hate ... no! anger! ... and pulled away again, this time hurting me. I rose to chase him but he was off the curb and into the street and under the wheels of a car before I could save him .... His head was crushed. He was dead when I picked him up. (50)

In the intervening years, Margaret and her husband Alan--prevented from working through their grief by the stiff-upper-lip deportment demanded by their brand of undemonstrative Methodism--have grown distant and uncommunicative. But whereas Alan eventually sought comfort in a supposedly secret, long-term affair with another woman, Margaret has withdrawn behind an aloof, judgmental exterior, sharply criticizing others whose behavior she anticipates will prove disruptive to her physical comfort and/or peace of mind. In the course of the play, her caustic comments, which appear to those around her as evidence of a presumption of superiority, are revealed to mask a traumatic fear that something else may go tragically wrong. Significantly, her narrative of Gabriel's death is elicited as she stands on the hotel balcony nervously monitoring Katharine's impulsive and potentially ill-advised venturing outdoors into the crowded plaza below to soak up local color on their first night in India. Margaret apparently fears that the enthusiasm with which Katharine has hurried into the street will lead as inexorably to tragedy as Gabriel's similar assertion of his own independence by rushing into another street did more than thirty years before. "I'm not very good at keeping an eye on people," she tells her interlocutor. "They rush out into danger and I'm helpless to save them" (48).

"Isn't that what mothers are supposed to do? Save their children," Margaret plaintively asks as she recalls her inability to stop Gabriel from running in front of a passing car (50). To protect her child from every possible danger, however, would involve a mother's immuring him from every potential life experience as well. This leads to a conflict in the play between a mother's loving attempt to save her son from injury and a son's resentment of his mother's smothering love--that is, between a mother's concern about the risks that her son takes and a son's need to escape his mother's overprotective grasp. The adult Waiter's resentment of Katharine's determination to ignore his potentially socially marginalizing sexuality proves different only in degree from the child Gabriel's impulsively running from Margaret's attempt to clean his face with her own spittle and make him more socially presentable. The particular significance of this dynamic for gay men and their mothers is highlighted by the presence in the Bombay hotel of two adult gay men, both of whom have been badly weakened by AIDS-related illnesses. Katharine befriends Harry, who reminds her of Walter. "People probably think I'm your mother," Katharine comments as the new-made friends set out on an adventuresome late-night foray into the bustling streets outside their hotel. "I'm sure my own mother wishes you were," Harry dryly replies, indicating the strain placed on his own family relationships by his sexual orientation and illness (54). "We must hold hands and we must never let go of each other" (52), Katharine asserts, in effect echoing the precaution that Margaret wishes she had taken with Gabriel years earlier and suggesting Katharine's own desire to reenact with Harry a more successful version of her relationship with Walter. Needless to say, in the surging crowd Katharine and Harry are separated, and act 1 ends with Katharine frantically calling for help lest Harry, in his AIDS-weakened state, fall and be crushed in the melee. However much a mother tries to guarantee her son's safety by holding firmly onto his hand, he is bound to be carried away from her into the street by the very ebb and flow of life.

There remains to be considered a final instance in A Perfect Ganesh of a troubled mother-son relationship, that of the goddess Parvati and her son Ganesh. It is this instance that gives the play its mythic resonance and delivers McNally's insight both as to how life's incipient tragedies may be successfully negotiated and how the sacred may be restored to a contemporary American life grown self-destructively secular.

II. The Enigma of Ganesh

The myth of Ganesh (sometimes Ganesa, Ganesha, or Ganapati) is remarkable for its blend of comedy and tragedy. In the most widely circulated version of his birth, upon which McNally relies for his play, Ganesh is created by the goddess Parvati, the consort of Siva, from the unguents of her bath, to provide herself with an agent whom she can station at her door to halt intruders while she is naked. (8) Recounting his origins to the audience, McNally's Ganesh emphasizes the conflict that existed between his parents: One day, before I was born, my mother Parvati, was sitting in her bath. She told an attendant to let no one enter, not even Shiva, her lord and master. But Shiva is everyone's lord and master and no one dared bar him from entering his wife's bath. Parvati covered herself in shame, she had no prestige now, but she was angry, too. Some say she decided then and there she must have a gana of her own. A gana is someone obedient to our will and our will alone. No woman had ever had a gana of her own. his is what happened: my mother Parvati gathered the saffron paste from her own body and with her own hand created a boy, her first born, her gana, me! (31)

Such a genesis possesses a triple resonance for McNally. First, as the guardian of borders in Hindu tradition, Ganesh is "the liminal god of transitions: he is placed at the doorway of temples to keep out the unworthy, in a position analogous to his role as Parvati's doorkeeper, and he can set up, as he did for his father, obstacles to the successful completion of goals." (9) It is in this guise that Ganesh's "guidance and protection" is sought by pious Hindus "at the beginning of a journey, venture or life change--however great or small." (10) Thus, as the photographs of Ganesh worship in India collected by Gita Mehta record, "his image is prominently displayed above the lintels of Indian doorways to ensure [that] only good fortune enters the house." (11) Likewise, automobile drivers often secure a small plastic image of the god to their dashboards (much as Roman Catholics once hung a St. Christopher medal from a rearview mirror) to invoke his protection in travel.

Throughout McNally's play, Ganesh--while always appearing to the audience as himself--facilitates Margaret and Katharine's journey in such guises as a jovial airline attendant who bumps them up to first class after their seat assignments have been lost in the reservations computer, a hotel chambermaid who launders their clothing, and a souvenir shop owner who arouses in Katharine her passion for collecting Ganesh figurines. More importantly, however, he directs their spiritual journey while disguised as a tour guide who challenges their perception of poverty in India; a Japanese tourist who consoles Margaret with the gift of a beautiful kimono after the latter has discovered a lump in her breast; a railway porter who serves them tea as they go through the Chittaurghar Pass and whose surreptitious fondling of Margaret's cancer-riddled breast brooks a decisive change in her attitude toward others; the narrator at a rural puppet show who pushes Katharine to address her conflicted feelings for her dead son; a non-English-speaking child whose joy and innocence beg Katharine to confront her racism; a ferryman who guides the two women down the Ganges to Varanasi, the sacred city of the dead, and forces them to address their fear of aging and death; and the hideous leper who, shortly before their journey's end, fills them with compassion for others and, more importantly, for themselves. Some "vacations can end abruptly," Ganesh informs the audience--much as Margaret and Katharine's does when, upon their return to Connecticut, they are informed of the death of the latter's husband. But some "trips have a way of going on," he continues, assuring the audience that the women will continue to grow spiritually even after their return from India (108).

The second resonance that the story of Ganesh's origin has for McNally concerns the way in which a mother's creative resources circumvent--and, ultimately, render insignificant--a father's phallic power. By fashioning Ganesh from the matter in her bath, Parvati is able to establish a creator-creature relationship with her son that is independent of her husband's sexual agency. And by commanding Ganesh to guard the entrance to her most private space while she is ritually purifying herself, Parvati further asserts her independence from her husband by according her son privileged, albeit not expressly sexual, access to her body. "We were so happy!" Ganesh recalls rhapsodically about his early relationship with his mother--that is, before the disruptive reappearance of Siva (31). Theirs is an ambivalent and vaguely erotic relationship insofar as the son is created expressly to guard the mother from the father's physical aggression while she is at her most vulnerable. Indeed, in some Hindu traditions, "Ganesa's mother ... comes to be identified more as consort than as parent" the son displacing his father entirely in his mother's affections. (12) Such a relationship can only cause confusion in the son's mind. "Some say I was created out of a mother's loneliness. Some say I was the expression of a woman's deepest need. I say: I don't know. What child does?" (27).

A Perfect Ganesh dramatizes how complex a bond exists between a mother and her son. Just as in some versions of the Ganesh story in which Parvati is driven to create a son because her husband's devotional austerities have led him to renounce sexual intercourse, (13) Margaret and Katharine are, if not alienated from their husbands, at least rarely intimate with them. In a tense exchange on the train, each woman accuses the other of forgetting what it is liked to be touched by a man (79-80). Their mutual accusations of an absence of marital satisfaction are confirmed elsewhere in the play. For example, Margaret explains that a spiteful behavior that she evidenced toward Katharine on an earlier vacation trip was the result of her having been "mad at Alan for some crack about how I looked in my new bathing suit" (17). That is, her husband callously embarrassed her about her body in front of others, much as Siva shamed Parvati by intruding upon her in the bath. And, toward the end of their journey, Margaret confesses her reluctance to inform her husband about her possible breast cancer. "It would give him one more reason to work late. He's had one reason for almost seven years. Her name is DeKennesey. She must be divorced. I know she's got two kids. I've seen them. She's only ten years younger than me. He's got her in one of those condos by the club" (103-4). Alienated from his wife following their son's death and her retreat emotionally behind a frosty, well-mannered facade, Alan has sought consolation in a relationship with another woman. That Alan's mistress is "only ten years younger" than Margaret and is herself the mother of two children suggests that it is not primarily sex that draws Alan to her, but an emotional connection more satisfying than the one that he enjoys with his wife. Little wonder that Margaret scoffingly rejects the premise of the romantic movie being shown on the plane during their flight to India: "The movies think that [sexual passion is] the solution to everything! A lot they know!" (13).

Likewise, during the course of the play, Katharine accounts for her lack of social refinement by revealing how, the daughter of a postal worker, she schemed to marry into a wealthier class more than thirty years earlier (64-65). The result is that, after so many years of marriage with so little in common, she and George have grown complacent with one another. Thus, as she leaves for her trip, her husband sits glued to a women's tennis game on television, looking up at Katharine only to ask if she has enough money (3). Later, mourning her son Walter's death, she blurts out, "Nothing compares to losing a child. No, nothing compares to losing that particular child [Walter]. Why couldn't it have been his brother or Nan [Katharine's only daughter] or one of her kids or George even?" (84). Marital passion may fade, but the bond between a mother and her first son remains strong despite conflicts in their adult relationship.

Indeed, the most deeply felt conflict between a mother and her adult son, McNally suggests, may be the result of an erotic tension that they have no means of relieving. One of the warmest moments in the play occurs when a spectral Walter dances first with Katharine and then with Margaret, allowing a mother to be once again the sole focus of her now-adult son's affection. Their "slow fox trot" (66) quickly becomes a ground of sexual contention between Katharine and Walter. "Since when do you like to dance with women?" Katharine asks (66), implicitly derogating her son's homosexuality while simultaneously acknowledging her hurt over the lack of similar physical contact in the past. "I don't. I'll suffer," he replies half-playfully, half-resentfully, while drawing a careful boundary between them: "Besides, you're not a woman. You're my mother" (66). The pair bicker as they dance, revealing both their special grace as a couple and the conflict that keeps them apart. When Katharine insults Walter by saying, "You still don't know how to hold a woman," he responds by pulling "her to him hard and close" and asking crudely, "You mean, like this?" (67), thereby bringing into the open the heretofore unacknowledged erotic element of their dance. The magic of their reconciliation and playful flirtation broken, Katharine slaps him. As Walter abandons her to dance instead with Margaret, Katharine is left to exclaim bitterly, "Break her heart, the way you did mine. I hate you" (68). Katharine's desire to secure Walter as her personal gana--as a creature whom she has created specifically to be obedient to her will and nobody else's--prevents her from allowing him to have his own sexuality, and ends in her momentarily ruing their relationship.

Margaret's dance with the spectral Walter is briefer, but far warmer. "Do I know you?" he asks after Margaret seizes the opportunity of Katharine's slapping Walter to cut in on them (67). "Never mind," she tells him, delighted to think of him as the adult manifestation of her dead child, Gabriel. "I just want to dance with you. I have always wanted to dance with you" (68). Ironically, having lost Gabriel when he was only four years old, Margaret is happy to have even this brief, fantasy-like encounter with the man whom he might have become, whereas Katharine's exasperation at her inability to control her adult son's sexuality results in only deeper and more painful frustration. Still, if but for a moment, each mother is content to be in the arms of her favorite child, without having to share him with anyone else--just as, presumably, the son is happy not to have his time with her interrupted by his father or siblings.

Finally, the story of Ganesh's origins resonates for McNally in terms of the sexual ambivalence of Ganesh himself, making for the most subtle way in which the god is associated with the crossing of borders. Even as an adult, Ganesh is traditionally depicted as possessing a plump, soft, vaguely ungendered body; rarely is he allowed the elegantly muscled pectorals and thighs often given to Siva and Visnu. Analyzing in detail the psychological implications of the symbolism surrounding Ganesh, Paul B. Courtright concludes: This combination of child-ascetic-eunuch in the symbolism of Ganesa--each an explicit denial of adult male sexuality--appears to embody a primal Indian male longing: to remain close to the mother and to do so in a way what [sic] will both protect her and yet be acceptable to the father. This means that the son must retain access to the mother but not attempt to possess her sexually. As a child, a renouncer, or a eunuch, he can legitimately maintain that precious but precarious intimacy with his mother because, although he is male, he is more like her then [sic] he is like his father. (14)

Courtright goes so far as to read Ganesh's frequent depiction as holding one of his tusks in his hand as an indication of his emasculation. (15)

In A Perfect Ganesh, the ambiguity of Ganesh's sexuality is brought to the audience's attention as Margaret examines one of Katharine's figurines and questions its gender. "He--I guess it's a he; in this day and age, I better watch what I say--he/she/it's got the head of an elephant" (66). For McNally, however, Ganesh's sexual ambivalence is not the result of the god's strategic erasure of his gender, as described by Courtright, but an indication of his ability to transcend differences and unite extremes--most obviously between male and female, but also, as will be seen shortly, between persons of dark skin and light, and between heterosexuals and homosexuals. In act 2, scene 1, Ganesh assumes the guise of Queenie, the chambermaid at the Lake Palace Hotel, where the women stay while visiting Udaipur. Initially, this scene may appear to have been scripted by McNally for a purely farcical purpose inasmuch as audiences invariably laugh at the visual incongruity of a male actor in a padded elephant suit wearing a chambermaid's apron and cap, pushing a carpet sweeper, and tittering demurely as an oversexed male hotel manager talks about female "jugs" (62) and admits his preference for "Calvin Klein underwear" (63). The largest and strongest animal on earth is rendered comically "weak" and subservient as a male plays a female part.

But, as the scene progresses, Queenie's respect for the hotel manager's ability to speak another language ("That is a God-like thing to be able to do" [61]) calls the audience's attention to the importance of human communication and reveals the most menial of the four persons onstage to be the most enlightened and sincere. (16) The alacrity with which her mercurial supervisor turns on her and threatens to make her "redundant" (61)--that is, to fire her--dramatizes her vulnerability as a lower-caste woman. Queenie's humiliation by her employer is part of a larger pattern of women being shamed by the men on whom they must depend. Parvati dishonored by her husband's violating the sanctity of her bath as she ritually purifies herself; Margaret is ashamed that her husband not only keeps a mistress, but has lodged her near the country club, where his comings and goings can be observed by members of their set; and Katharine could never bring herself to tell Walter the story of how she felt obliged to sleep with his father on the night that they first met after she crashed a country club dance (64-65). Women save face by pretending that they do not know about their husbands' sexual betrayals, a reality that leads Margaret to comment sadly, "What happens to women? Who are we? What are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to be? Men still have all the marbles. All we have are our children and sooner or later we lose them" (104).

Thus, rather than violating a woman's most private arena (as did his father, Siva), McNally's Ganesh is a male god who recognizes a woman's hidden sadness and seeks to comfort her. No matter how farcical a male actor may appear while wearing a padded elephant costume and dressing as a chambermaid, it is significant that in the Udaipur hotel room, Ganesha speaks to Margaret and Katharine through Queenie, an unskilled woman over whom her supervisor tyrannizes, and not through the more socially authoritative hotel manager. Ganesh's identification with Queenie bespeaks an acceptance of difference and a willingness to allow others to be. What is more, as we shall now see, it dramatizes McNally's proposed method of negotiating the threat of sudden, violent injury or destruction: by accepting as religious sacrament the seemingly antithetical poles of every realm of human experience.

III. "Allow, Accept, Be"

To understand the extent of Ganesh's acceptance of others and the religious salvation that McNally feels is the consequence of such generosity, one must recall that, following an initial period of happiness shared by mother and son, Ganesh's story turns suddenly tragic.

In A Perfect Ganesh, the story of Ganesh's death and revival is told by a village puppet master, whose performance for Margaret and Katharine is arranged by their tour guide (87-90). Returning to the palace after completing his austerities, Shiva is furious to be denied access to his wife's quarters and engages the meddlesome doorman in battle. "I will have to kill the boy with my own hands,' Shiva proclaims. "Let it never be said that a man was subservient to his wife!" (88). Sneaking up behind Parvati's champion, Shiva cuts off his head "with one swift stroke of his sword" (88). However, when informed of his dead adversary's identity, Shiva repents his precipitous action and promises to restore the gana to life by grafting onto his torso the head of the first creature that passes by, which proves to be an elephant. Ganesh is, thus, traditionally depicted as an endomorphic male sporting the head of an elephant. His decapitation echoes within the play Gabriel's head being crushed beneath the wheel of the automobile that he ran in front of; Waiter's nearly falling victim to the same fate when, as he lay dying in the street, his assailants returned in their car to run him over, "just swerving at the last minute, only missing my head by about this much" (25); and possibly, even, Harry's nearly being crushed when he collapses in the crowded street outside the Bombay hotel.

But, unlike Gabriel's and Waiter's narratives, Ganesh's recovery of life, albeit in a hybrid form, allows his story finally to be about "reconciliation, renewal, and re-birth" (89). John Grimes explains why in Hindu culture Ganesha's experience earns him the title of the "Lord of Beginnings": His beheading took place at a threshold, as all beginnings do. Every beginning is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. In order to transcend the physical and ascend to the Divine, one must "lose one's head" that is, give up one's egotistical viewpoint. One must be both a victor and victim. One is a victim because one's head must be lost. One is a victor because the new [head] is a new beginning, a divine manifestation. (17)

Similarly, Royina Grewal notes that through Shiva's action, Ganesha is "created, destroyed and reborn to a higher status. Death becomes a bridge to greater things. The episode reinforces the Hindu cyclic concept of the universe that repeatedly disintegrates and is recreated." (18) Margaret and Katharine must learn to do something similar in the course of the play: accept that an ending (such as the loss of a son, whether to death or to adult independence) can actually be a new beginning. They do so by learning to integrate the incongruous and often polarizing extremes of life, in much the same manner as contradictory and seemingly mutually exclusive extremes cohere in the iconography of Ganesha.

Possessing the head of an elephant and a human body, girdled with a snake, and incongruously riding atop a mouse or rat, Ganesh's iconography is "a luminous statement of unity in diversity" (19) and points to "the supreme goal of Hindu metaphysics: finding an over-arching unity in which all apparent contradictions can be contained." (20) His iconography reinforces what Gita Mehta has called "the moral imperative" of Hinduism: [O]pposites can and must live in peaceful co-existence. Non-violence and humanism derive from that imperative. The elephant does not kill living creatures to survive; it is a symbol of ahimsa or non-violence. A human body circled by a snake connects the elephant to a mouse, the union of the small with the great, the microcosm with the macrocosm. Illustrating the intimate connection between all life forms, as a meditational diagram Ganesha incarnates Hindu philosophy's fundamental law, the unity in diversity that it is humanity's primary duty to maintain. (21)

This motif is extended in iconographic traditions that depict Ganesh holding a radish in one of his hands, for the edible root is thought to be endowed with "the eight supreme flavors," among them "bitterness, sourness, astringency, sweetness, hotness, and saltiness." Because it is mild and possesses "the greatest relish," the radish is celebrated for its ability to harmonize extremes. (22) Likewise, because of Ganesh's power to prevent any one element from dominating over others, "Ganesa, as the metaphor for the truth, tells us clearly that truth is embodied in a combination of alternatives and is never conveyed by single exclusive viewpoints." (23)

For McNally, Ganesh represents the human ability to transcend a polarizing duality and accept the underlying unity of all life. Introducing himself at the opening of the play, Ganesh tells the audience: I am everywhere.... I am in your mind and in the thoughts you think, in your heart, whether full or broken, in your face and in the very air you breathe. Inhale, c'est moi, Ganesha. Exhale, yo soy, Ganesha. Ich bin; io sono. Toujours, Ganesha! I am in what you eat and what you evacuate. I am sunlight, moonlight, dawn and dusk. I am stool. I am in your kiss. I am in your cancer. I am in the smallest insect that crawls across your picnic blanket towards the potato salad. I am in your hand that squashes it. I am everywhere. (3)

Ganesh's assertion of himself as a universal principle is accomplished linguistically (he says, "it is I" in French, Spanish, German, and Italian) and in terms of his synthesis of seemingly antithetical actions and identities. He is present in both the act of inhaling and of exhaling, in both the food that one ingests and the stool that one evacuates, and in both the kiss that brings sensual pleasure and the cancerous tumor that causes pain. (24) Ganesh's reality transcends the idea of polar opposites, each of which normally functions as the negation of the other (full/broken, sunlight/moonlight, dawn/dusk). Rather, Ganesh harmonizes antitheses, making for a unified existence. And, inhabiting every level of being, Ganesh appears as both the person troubled by an ant at a picnic and as the insect who enjoys the food as much as the person who prepared it. Ganesh transcends divisions even among species, promoting the right of every creature to enjoy life.

Ganesh achieves this harmonious state by refusing to deny the existence of anything that is natural, no matter whether it is something that humans long for (a kiss that allows one's heart to be full) or recoil from (cancer, the trauma of which may break one's heart). As Margaret and Katharine arrive to board their flight to Bombay, Ganesh claps his hands to fill the empty stage with the noise of a bustling airline terminal. In particular, he directs the audience's attention to the sound of children "crying, yelling, laughing, playing" (s.d., 4). "Listen to them!" he commands. "How could I not be? Happy, that is. Is there a more joyful sound than children? A more lovely sight than their precious smiles? A sweeter smell than their soiled diapers? There's a place to bury one's face and know bliss!" (4). Surely, rather than finding "bliss" in a baby's dirty diaper, the average person is more likely to be disgusted, if not actually repulsed, by the smell. But Ganesh's equanimity and unfailing good nature derive exactly from his ability to delight equally in a baby's smile and in its waste--that is, in every part of a baby's existence, not simply those that are easy to love. And, because of his ability to accept the unpleasantness of stool as easily as he does the pleasure of eating, Ganesh is able to accept the inevitability of death with as much composure as he does the joy of living inasmuch as both are parts of the same organic process rather than dualities to be privileged one over the other.

As "a deity controlling transitions and new states," (25) Ganesh ensures that in the course of the play both Margaret and Katharine will be led to a new psycho-spiritual state in which they are, like him, able to integrate seeming contradictions and 'Allow. Accept. Be" Margaret, for example, arrives in India determined to see the country "my way, from a comfortable seat, somewhat at a distance" (10). Fearing the messiness of Indian street life, she prefers to remain on their hotel room's balcony while Katharine prepares to go for a late-night walk among the crowds below:

Katharine: I just want to walk among them. Experience them.

Margaret: You can experience them from up here.

Katharine: Don't you feel drawn to be a part of all that?

Margaret: No. (47)

Thus Margaret begins their Indian sojourn resisting the call to enter into what Paine calls "the living stream ... of the community life and its traditions." Her perfectly matched, efficiently packed suitcases (4) bespeak her determination to survive the essentially disruptive experience of travel through sheer force of will. Unlike Ganesh, who loves the sound of children's voices, Margaret dreads being on a plane filled with "lots and lots of children, all screaming, yelling their lungs out, running up and down the aisles all night" (5). Likewise, she resents the intrusion of a passenger from coach into their first-class cabin: "I hate it when they do that. The first class bathrooms should be for the first class passengers" (21). Margaret seeks to establish and maintain strict borders, and to hold other people to the standards of proper--that is, nondisruptive--behavior.

In the course of their journey, however, Margaret's aloof, often censorious, detachment is revealed to be evidence not of her believing herself superior to other people, but of her feeling so preternaturally vulnerable to the vicissitudes of human existence that she attempts to anticipate and forestall possible accidents. At the outset of their journey to India, after arriving at the airport and efficiently summarizing for the desk clerk the specifics of the reservations that she made for herself and Katharine months before, she is pulled up short by the sight of his increasingly frantic search for their names in his computer and concludes her opening speech with the question, "Is there a problem?" (5). For the remainder of the play, Margaret anticipates, and attempts in advance to resolve, problems both big and small: that she will be inconvenienced by Katharine's excess baggage (8), that Katharine will lose her passport (8), that their plane will crash (13-14), that gum may stick to her crowns (15), that she will be disappointed by the Taj Mahal's lack of "resonance" (18), that one of them will slip getting off the ferry at Elephanta Island (53), that the skiff they ride down the Ganges will capsize (98), or that Katharine will catch pneumonia on the river after forgetting to wear a scarf (98). The shock of losing Gabriel so many years earlier has rendered her both defensively incapable of intimacy with others and so determinedly proactive in the face of the uncertainty of human existence that she often appears inhumane to others.

The ever-sympathetic Ganesh, however, recognizes that Margaret's inability to relax in the present moment is the result of her worrying constantly about others, and that far from being insensitive to other people, she is in reality the kinder of the two women (60). When Margaret sadly acknowledges, "Everyone thinks I'm a bossy bitch" Ganesh sympathetically observes, "It's a clever defense" (49). In leading Margaret to accept such unpleasant realities as the pain caused by accidents and the disfigurement that comes with age and, ultimately, death, Ganesh draws her back into "the living stream ... of the community life and its traditions." For Margaret represents one of two attitudes toward the threat of impending danger juxtaposed within the play. A fellow tourist with whom Margaret and Katharine share a train compartment tells them the story of his wife Kelly's revulsion at the sight and smell of the burning ghats where Hindu corpses are ceremonially cremated and where she has a disturbing encounter with a leper. Feeling that she "will never, ever be clean again" (76), she hurriedly retreats to the antiseptic safety of America, leaving him to complete the trip alone. But in ferrying the two women down the Ganges to Varanasi, Ganesh directs their skiff alongside the corpses of animals that float on the surface of the water, as well as those of an adult human (99) and, climactically, a baby boy (100) who would most likely have been the same age as Gabriel when the latter was killed. After initially begging their navigator to return them to the safety of their hotel, Margaret asks plaintively, "What are we supposed to do? I can't accept all this. My heart and mind would break if I did. And yet I must. I know it" (101).

By forcing herself to accept "all this" Margaret proves heroic. On the plane ride to Bombay, the intruder from coach callously remarks that Margaret has "cruel eyes" that are "filled with hate" and recommends that she "needs a good purge in the Ganges" (21). His insult proves a prophetic prescription, for Margaret will find her experience at Varanasi transformationally purgative. (26) In navigating their vessel around a human corpse in the river, Ganesha, who is functioning as the skiff's pole man, purposefully "splashes some water on Margaret" (s.d., 101). "I feel slimy now;' Margaret says, recoiling (101). But, unlike Kelly, she does not retreat to her hotel and take "shower after shower after shower" (76) in an attempt to purify herself. Instead, she forces herself to accept the terrifying reality of human mortality associated with the water, even though she understands fully that "my heart and mind would break if I did." (27)

McNally figures Margaret's acceptance of "all this" as an act of religious acclamation. Earlier in the play, while making conversation with a Dutch tourist whom she meets in a village square, she reveals that her favorite painting is Rembrandt's Woman Bathing: It's just a woman wading in a river. She has her shift pulled up to her thighs. She's looking at herself in the reflection of the water. She's very pensive but very powerful, too. It's a dark painting, most Rembrandt is, but there's something about it. Her isolation. Her independence. Her strength. (93)

Traveling down the Ganges, Margaret and Katharine witness a variation on Rembrandt's theme when they see in the distance an "old woman with ... sagging breasts bathing" who is "oblivious to us." Instead of being repulsed by her, Margaret quietly exclaims, "She's lovely" (101). No longer afraid of being contaminated by the chaos of life, Margaret will henceforth resist the attempt to make pre-emptive strikes against uncertainty and disorder. When Katharine comments on the Ganges scene, "Everything in and on this river seems inevitable and right.... Even us in our Burberry raincoats. We all have a place here. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Allow. Accept. Be," Margaret replies simply, "Yes" (101). Her monosyllabic response is an affirmation of every part of the life experience, which includes the death of toddlers, the emergence of unsightly liver spots on one's hands (18), and the sudden discovery of a lump in one's breast, as well as delight in a new bathing suit and the quiet pleasure of a day in the park with one's child. Her "yes" is an acclamation--a liturgical "amen" or "let it be"--that voices her newfound, Ganesh-like acceptance of all life.

Katharine must learn a different sort of lesson, but one that likewise involves the acceptance of those parts of the life experience that she would rather exclude: she must grow to embrace not simply the parts of Walter that, gana-like, served her will, but those parts of him that previously she had refused to acknowledge, such as his sexuality, his joy at discovering the love of Jonathan, and his grief at losing him. Not having been born into wealth, Katharine has been affected by her struggle to fit in to a social world where she often feels like "your basic white trash" (64). In a moment of intimate revelation, she tells Margaret the story of how she met her future husband by crashing a dance at the local country club, removing her shoes and holding up her skirts to sneak across a sodden golf course (64-65)--literally crossing a border to transgress into a world where she did not belong. She goes on to admit that she found herself attracted to George by the way in which he held his cigarette, suggesting that she was beguiled by a socially fashioned image, rather than his inner substance. Ironically, her unhealthy drive to acquire material objects (a Lalique vase [17]; "shopping my tits off" for souvenir gifts [62-64]) results in her being unable to keep track of her innumerable pieces of luggage. In the course of the play, she loses her flight bag (12), her cassette player and tapes (28), her camera (73), her guidebook (86), and her binoculars (97). "Sooner or later, I lose everything," Katharine mournfully acknowledges (86)--even, as Benilde Montgomery points out, her son and husband. (28) More so than Margaret, Katharine must learn the Hindu/Buddhist lesson that dukka (suffering) is the result of the human attachment to persons and things in the physical realm and that the individual may release him/herself from such suffering only by recognizing the illusory nature (maya) of all desire.

More significantly, although on the surface Katharine appears to have assimilated fairly well into her husband's social class, she retains a lower-middle-class prejudice against blacks and gays that is the result of her illusory belief in a uniform social ideal. Katharine's pursuit of "a perfect Ganesh" figurine (102) evidences the same impulse that prevented her from accepting her son's homosexuality. Much as she refashioned herself to satisfy the expectations of George's country club set, she struggled as a mother to fashion her favorite child, Walter, into the "perfect" image--which, from her point of view, means that he must be heterosexual. Consequently, three years after Walter's death, she continues to ignore the homophobia that motivated his murderers while brooding over the fact that his six attackers were "[b]lack! All of them black!" Unlike Margaret, who repeatedly complains about gender inequality (5, 32, 104), Katharine manifests no resentment at her own social and financial dependence upon her husband. Rather, she supports a monolithic view of the world that equates dark skin pigment and homosexuality--and even her own gender--as deviations from a supposed white, male, heterosexual ideal.

Katharine is forced to confront the consequences of her prejudice when Ganesh, in the guise of a tour guide commenting upon a village puppet show, alters the printed script that Katharine holds in her hand to parallel his own story with Waiter's. Badly shaken, she retreats to the riverbank, where she meets an Indian child whose innocence and joy move her deeply--and, significantly, whose gender is never specified. The child's unfamiliarity with English frees Katharine to speak more openly about race and sexuality than she would at home: Stay this way forever. When you grow up, I won't like you. I will hate you and fear you because of the color of your skin--just as I hated and feared my son because he loved men. I won't tell you this to your face but you will know it, just as he did and it will sicken and diminish us both. (96) (29)

In a dramatic effort to provoke catharsis, Katharine forces herself to express aloud those feelings that she never allowed herself to deliver outright to Walter, shouting into the echoing space of the river valley the words that bespeak her prejudice: "Fag! Queer! Cocksucker! Dead from AIDS queer meat!" (97)--the same epithets that Walter's assailants hurled at him while beating him to death (24). And she calls upon the Indian child to do the same, teaching him or her to shout hate-filled English words that he/she does not understand and thinks are part of a game. Having finally given voice to the homophobia that she has long harbored, Katharine collapses in the child's arms, begging Walter to forgive her (97).

McNally underscores the significance of Katharine's emotional breakthrough in a poignant way. Earlier in the play, after Ganesh recognizes Walter on the flight to Bombay, Katharine's son comments of their relationship, "Where my mother goes, can this one be far behind?" (23). His tone of resignation suggests that he does not follow his mother willingly, but is forced to do so by her desire to control him even in death; as her gana, he remains subject to her will. Thus one way of understanding why Walter's spirit hovers over the action of the play is that, like the pseudonymous character of McNally's "Andre's Mother," Katharine is unable to let go of her bitterness over both his homosexuality and her premature loss of him; she clings to him in an unhealthy manner, preventing his spirit from completing its journey. More than by her grief over his death, her suffering is caused by her continued attachment to him. Significantly, Walter's final appearance occurs as Katharine breaks down in the arms of the Indian child after finally expressing aloud her fear of difference. The stage direction specifies that at this moment Walter exits, blowing her a kiss (97). He does not reappear in the play, signaling that Katharine has finally broken through her desire to control him--much as Andre's mother must finally force herself to let go of the white balloon that she clutches so tightly at her son's memorial service. Katharine can finally "Allow. Accept. Be."

"Each moment is a threshhold [sic], a new beginning, and in order to begin afresh, the old must give way to the new," observes John Grimes while commenting upon the resonance that Ganesh carries within Hindu culture. "To remove an obstacle so that the birth of the new can take place, requires the placing of an obstacle as well as the removal of an obstacle. He [Ganesha] both creates and destroys, facilitates and hinders." (30) In employing the character of Ganesh, McNally asks his audience to resist judging the present moment as either positive or negative, a source either of hope or despair, an experience of either pleasure or pain--but to accept that human peace of mind lies in recognizing that every moment contains both possibilities at once. Margaret manifests this enlarged consciousness when, opening her blouse to permit Katharine to feel the lump in her breast (103)--an intimate act of self-revelation of which she was incapable at the start of the play--she demonstrates that the new obstacle that she faces in breast cancer paradoxically allows her to remove the old obstacle that prevented the women from genuinely liking one another despite their having been friends for many years (82). Similarly, on their last day in India, Katharine is unable to bring herself to overcome her final prejudice and kiss a leper, and instead "gave the man fifty rupees and one of her perfect Ganeshas" (105). Ganesh comments that although "she did not sleep well that night" while "worr[ying] about her soul," the leper was able to enjoy "the finest meal of his entire, miserable life" (105). That is, the same action that fills Katharine with self-doubt about her humanity nonetheless proves a welcome relief of the beggar's needs. Ambivalence is all.

More importantly, it is revealed only at the end of the play that, as mothers, both Margaret and Katharine have each been able to care for a son, albeit in a way that neither anticipated. Their grief at losing Gabriel and Walter has actually prepared them to care for two other young men who are threatened with a tragically early death. Arriving home, Margaret discovers a postcard addressed to the two of them from Ben, one of the HIV-positive gay men whom they met on their first night in India. The postcard offers the audience its first news of Harry, whose collapse in the crowded street outside the hotel brought act 1 to its troubling close: Dear Girls, (all right, ladies!), welcome home! Hope you had a wonderful trip and didn't have to use that police whistle again. Did you see the Taj Mahal? Didn't you die just a little? Thanks for all your kindness. Harry is still in the hospital here but doing well. We're both hanging in there. What else are you gonna do? Love, Ben. (109)

"Guess who the postcard's of?" Margaret asks Katharine over the telephone. "Your favorite, Ganesha. A perfect Ganesh" (109). The play does not specify the nature of Margaret and Katharine's "kindness" to the two men. The audience can only speculate that Katharine was able to reach Harry where he had collapsed in the street and used her police whistle to summon help to transport him to the hospital, where his condition was stabilized--the very actions that she had not been able to perform for Walter after he was beaten by strangers and died in a hospital emergency room before Katharine could arrive. And Margaret perhaps employed her exemplary organizational skills, while intimidating the airline officials with her "bossy bitch" hauteur, to cut through the red tape and schedule the men's early, emergency passage home--the same take-charge behavior once resented by young Gabriel.

No, mothers may not be able to keep their children safe, but they can comfort them in their distress and reaffirm that no matter how disruptive a threat to happiness their children face, they do not face it alone. In the words of Katharine's guide book, mothers can allow their sons to discover who they are and to pursue an independent existence, no matter the threats that such independence brings; and mothers can accept their sons in their entirety and not attempt to judge them by a social convention that is little more than popular prejudice. Mothers must recognize that when they held their children, they "were holding a god in [their] arms" (97)--that is, all persons, whether black or white, gay or straight, male or female, are divine. Only by learning to allow and accept can mothers themselves be--that is, can they know the transcendent equanimity of Ganesh, whose heart is so large that it can hold all the joy and sorrow in the world and not break. (31)

IV. Conclusion: AIDS, Grief, and Art

Since A Perfect Ganesh premiered in 1993, McNally has been asked on numerous occasions to provide the play's genesis. He has explained: I took a trip to India for three weeks and the moment I met two middle-aged women from Connecticut on a train (for all of two hours) I knew I would one day write a play about what got them to take such an arduous trip when they could have gone to St. Croix for the 10th year with their husbands. I obviously did not base the play on these two ladies, just the fact of their trip set me off writing a play about two women I cared about. (32)

The actual circumstances of McNally's experience are, needless to say, more complex than such an anecdote allows. A columnist for Horizon magazine for several years, he was offered in lieu of salary owed him a two-week trip to Rajasthan and environs that had been arranged in March 1987 by the Indian government for a group of art historians and museum curators. (33) McNally's own experience in India apparently proved as deeply transformative as Margaret and Katharine's for, shortly after his return to the United States, he wrote an editorial for Horizon in which he proclaimed, "going to India isn't just a travel experience; it's a life-enhancing one." (34) India came to represent for McNally--much as he seeks to represent it in the character of Ganesh--the engaging way in which riotous multiplicities can inhere in a profound unity. "My most overwhelming impression was that there were so many simultaneous ones. Being in India is not a passive experience. You are assaulted on every level of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual consciousness--all at the very same time." Most importantly, he marveled at "the beauty of people who delight in the spirit and presence and wonder of each other. If Indians know something we don't, it is perhaps this sense that the greatest treasure on this planet is one another. It is this great humanism I found in India that I now realize was its greatest spiritual bequest to this lucky traveler." (35)

What McNally has not publicly acknowledged is the extent to which in March 1987, following the recent deaths of his two closest friends and oldest professional collaborators, he was in need of such a "spiritual bequest." Less than two weeks before he departed for India, McNally spoke at the memorial service for actor James Coco, who had died suddenly of coronary arrest on 25 February. Coco had performed in Here's Where I Belong (1968), the ill-fated musical made of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, for which McNally had written the book; starred in Next (1967), which offered both actor and playwright a career-making success; and had last appeared onstage in McNally's It's Only a Play (1985). And, as McNally noted in his eulogy, the service for Coco was eight months to the day after that of actor and director Robert Drivas, McNally's former lover and the first actor for whom McNally had written parts in multiple plays, who had died on 29 June 1986, following an AIDS-related illness--one of the many friends and professional associates that McNally would lose to AIDS. (36) Thus, infusing the play is a sense of personal loss as powerful as Margaret's and Katharine's. While McNally may not consciously, like Katharine, have gone "to India for [his] soul" (18) because he "heard it could heal" (45), his initial state of mind upon arriving there must not have been far different from Margaret's and Katharine's.

To what extent might the path on which Ganesh leads Margaret and Katharine suggest the emotional road traveled by McNally himself? Significantly, rather than offering the women esoteric enlightenment--as Richard Corliss suggests (37)--Ganesh leads them to a carnivalesque view of the world that is not available in emotionally subdued, socially complacent Greenwich, nor, most likely, in AIDS-exhausted New York City. Ganesh's first words, which open the play, are "I am happy" (3). Likewise, on the base of the first figurine that Katharine buys at the start of her search for "a perfect Ganesh" is written the promise, "I'm happy and I want people to be happy, too" (71). Finding that life is lived all the more intensely in the shadow of death, and insisting as much upon the carnivalesque reality of evacuation as upon consumption, Margaret and Katharine are led by Ganesh on a riotous journey across India that allows them to experience a deeper festivity than either woman has known in Connecticut--one that is an intensification of the everyday world and not a mystical removal from it. (38) Like Margaret and Katharine, McNally seems to have enjoyed a carnivalesque release from his private grief while in India.

Perhaps the most striking effect of McNally's trip to India is that in writing a play that leads its two protagonists--and, by extension, its audience--from grief to a Miltonic "calm of mind, all passion spent," McNally creates a monument as powerful as India's Taj Mahal. McNally structures A Perfect Ganesh so that, after experiencing the heartbreak of Varanasi, Margaret and Katharine visit the iconic tomb, where they are rendered speechless by its ethereal beauty. The Taj, they learn from their guidebook (18-19), was built as the tomb of Arjumand Banu, the first wife of Akbar's grandson, Khunam. Upon his accession to the Mughal throne, Khunam became known as Shah Janah, and his wife would subsequently be known as Mumtaz Mahal Begum, the "Lady" or the "Chosen One of the Palace." (39) Their marriage proved a great romantic partnership that ended only with the death of Mumtaz in 1631. Conceived to serve as "an earthly representation of the heavenly paradise where Mumtaz awaited her grieving husband," (40) the Taj has raised "questions transcending time and cultures about the nature of love, of grief and beauty[,] and of whether these intangible qualities can be given substantive and enduring earthly expression." (41) On his tour of India, while grieving the loss of the two people dearest to him, McNally found in the Taj a model for how one can transcend one's grief by celebrating it. The Taj may be the world's great emblem of how loss is transformed to splendor when it is embraced, fully accepted, and allowed simply to be.

In his early career, McNally brooded over how one negotiates challenges to one's sense of security and well-being. In And Things That Go Bump in the Night, Clarence is helplessly drawn into the sadistic games of Ruby and her family; Marion is the hapless victim of an absurd military machine in Next; in The Ritz (1975), Gaetano shrinks before the irrational animus of his wife's father and brother; and in both print versions of The Lisbon Traviata (1985; heavily revised in 1989 and 1990), Stephen is powerless to persuade Mike not to abandon him for a younger man. AIDS made that threat even more palpable than it had seemed before to McNally. The playwright's March 1987 trip to India offered him an alternate model for how a person may continue living in the shadow of tragedy. How did McNally deal with the grief of friends lost to AIDS? Like the Japanese tourist who comforts Margaret with the gift of a beautiful kimono, causing her to protest that "it's not warranted, such kindness" (52), he wrote a play, founded on grief, that is as luminous as the Taj Mahal and that serves as a gift of grace to others who are grieving.

University of Central Arkansas

NOTES

(1) Jeffrey Paine, Father India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 102.

(2) Terrence McNally, A Perfect Ganesh (Garden City, N.Y.: Fireside Theatre, 1993), 101. Further quotations from this edition are cited in the text.

(3) Terrence McNally, Dead Man Walking (unpublished TS supplied by McNally), 2.

(4) This scene is the more unusual for the fact that nowhere else in his canon does McNally represent violence so directly. In A Perfect Ganesh, for example, Waiter's brutal killing by a gang of "fag-bashers" is narrated onstage as a remembered event (25-26) and is not reenacted for the audience to see. In Unusual Acts of Devotion (first acted in 2008 but still unpublished), whose action is repeatedly interrupted by helicopters overhead as police search for a serial killer, Mrs. Darnell's strangulation is accomplished onstage, but just out of view of the audience. (As in Dead Man Walking, the audience is alerted to the murderer's presence on the roof by the ominous glow of his cigarette in the upstage darkness.) And, again faithful to the rules of Greek tragedy, Clarence's electrocution on Ruby's fence occurs offstage in And Things That Go Bump in the Night and is indicated to the audience by the blackout that the electrical surge causes in the household. Only in the final version of The Lisbon Traviata is violence performed onstage, but even here Stephen's

stabbing of his lover is performed as an operatic gesture, Stephen's obliviousness to Mike's pain as he lays dying in Stephen's arms being more shocking to the audience than Stephen's actual assault. But the girl's scream in Dead Man Walking, it should be noted, is similar to the "wild, uncontainable animal sound" that Bobby emits offstage but which is heard by characters onstage in Love! Valour! Compassion! (Garden City, N.Y.: Fireside Theatre, 1995), 80, after he is informed of the sudden death of his sister.

(5) Terrence McNally, Lips Together, Teeth Apart (New York: Plume, 1992), 75.

(6) Ibid., 78.

(7) An opera company's baritone narrates a similar act of helpless witnessing in act 3 of Golden Age (John E Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts rehearsal script, 3 March 2010 [unpublished TS supplied by McNally]), McNally's most recent play. Speaking to the tempestuous soprano, Maria Malabran, Tamburini recalls, "I was in the audience in Naples during an Othello when you opened your mouth and no sound came out.... A cry escaped from the audience as if we wanted to give you our own breath" (83-84). Malabran's description of the dangerous risks that she takes in performing (81) reveals singing to be as much a life-and-death risk as flying a fragile aircraft.

(8) Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, ed., Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit (London: Penguin, 1975), 261-69, provides the fullest and most readily available version of the myth of Ganesh's origin. Alternate versions of his birth are summarized in Yves Bonnefoy, comp., Asian Mythologies, trans. Wendy Doniger et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Paul B. Courtright, Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 41-62; John A. Grimes, Ganapati: Song of the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 68-72; Shakuntala Jagannathan and Nauditha Krishna, Ganesha: The Auspicious ... The Beginning (Bombay: Valkels, Feffer, and Simons, 1992), 31-43; Yuvraj Krishan, Ganesa: Unravelling an Enigma (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 38-42; and Ludo Rocher, "Ganesa's Rise to Prominence in Sanskrit Literature," in Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, ed. Robert L. Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 69-83 (74-76). "A man who would barge in on a woman in her bath is a pig," Maria Callas proclaims dismissively in Master Class (New York: Plume, 1995), 46, when, several years following A Perfect Ganesh, McNally returned to the myth of Siva and Parvati without actually naming the figures.

(9) Robert L. Brown, introduction to Brown, Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, 1-18 (3).

(10) James H. Bae, Ganesh: Removing the Obstacles (San Rafael, Calif.: Mandala, 2008), 9.

(11) Gita Mehta, Eternal Ganesha (New York: Vendome, 2006), 10.

(12) Lawrence Cohen, "The Wives of Ganesa," in Ganesh: Studies of an Ancient God, 115-39 (125). In South Indian traditions in which Ganesh remains "unmarried and fully devoted to his mother" (Bae, 19), "a confirmed bachelor is often sarcastically called Ganesa" (Krishan, 63).

(13) Brown, 3; Courtright, 107.

(14) Courtright, 111-12.

(15) Ibid., 111.

(16) The difficulty of human communication is a major theme of A Perfect Ganesh. Hotel phones ring yet, to the women's exasperation, there is never anyone on the other end of the line; the American women do not appreciate Indian humor; Margaret and Katharine attempt to communicate with each other, yet cannot make themselves heard, either from a hotel balcony several stories above the street or from across a river; and Katharine regularly falls back upon Spanish when speaking with South Asians. These elements are part of a larger motif in McNally's middle-period plays, of walls, scars, and partitions that divide people from each other.

(17) Grimes, 74. Royina Grewal, The Book of Ganesha (New Delhi: Viking, 2001), notes: "An allegorical message is also contained in the beheading of Parvati's son. When the ego is too assertive, Shiva cuts it off, destroying darkness and ignorance. So too does Ganesha aid his devotees to rise beyond the limitations of self, helping them to be reborn into eternity. The decapitation, then, signifies Ganesha's elevation to heightened consciousness and his transformation into a superior deity" (36). As discussed below, Margaret and Katharine must be released from "the limitations of self" by Ganesh, who has already achieved this state.

(18) Grewal, 35.

(19) Ibid., 54.

(20) Mehta, 72.

(21) Ibid. Responding to Katharine's initial expression of interest in his cult, Ganesh explains, "This demonstrates the concept--so important to me!--that opposites--an elephant and a mouse--can live together happily. That love of good food (I am always eating) and profound spiritual knowledge can go together. That a fat, rotund person can still be a supreme connoisseur of dance and music. In fact, I prove that the world is full of opposites which exist peacefully side by side" (69).

(22) Christopher Wilkinson, "The Tantric Ganesa: Texts Preserved in the Tibetan Canon" in Brown, Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, 235-75 (245).

(23) Phyllis Granoff, "Ganesa as Metaphor: The Mudgala Purana," in Brown, Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, 85-99 (93). Grimes approaches this insight from a philosophic point of view: "Ganesa lore in particular, and the Mudgala Purana specifically, affirms that Ganesa is a physical embodiment of two seemingly incongruous parts. Somehow Ganapati, who has the head of an elephant and the body of a human being, is the unifier of these disparate parts. He is the unifier, but not in the sense of adding parts together and obtaining a whole: he is what he is. He is a symbol, it is true, but a symbol of that which has not parts. The concept of 'monism' can posit a single entity with internal distinctions, for example, a single tree with leaves, branches, flowers, fruits, etc. or a single God with internal distinctions--but the absolute nonduality that tat tvam asi or Ganesa points to is a nonduality or radical monism in which there are no internal distinctions either. The insight this nonduality implies is that the 'non' of nonduality categorically and universally says 'not-this, not-this' (neti-neti) to every type of concept, inclusive" (152).

(24) In an image that is not available in the Latin alphabet, Ganesh's "curved elephant's trunk is a representation [in Sanskrit and Tamil] of the pranava mantra, Om, the sound from which the world was created" (Grimes, 77-78), making Ganesh into the source and incarnation of the absolute. See Grimes, 77-80, and Rankorath Karunakaran, The Riddle of Ganesha (Bombay: Book Quest, 1992), 41-43.

(25) Brown, 9.

(26) McNally himself notes in an interview that Margaret and Katharine "cannot bring themselves to go into the Ganges. If Indians see water as a symbolic cleansing place, to the women it's something of terror. The Ganges is filled with dead bodies and disease, and their fear"; see Terrence McNally, interview by Carol Rosen, Theater Week, 27 February-5 March 1995, 12-24 (18). On Varanasi (also Benares or Banaras) as the most sacred site of Hinduism, see Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). And on the sociology of death in Varanasi, see Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). As Parry, 120-21, explains, the purpose of making a pilgrimage to Varanasi is "lightening"--that is, to return home with less superfluity of money, possessions, and emotional attachments than before. Thus, in the course of their journey across India, Katharine loses her possessions and prejudices, while Margaret loses her emotional reserve. As Margaret and Katharine's tour guide explains, "For the pious Hindu ... it is considered especially auspicious to die here [in Varanasi], insuring an instant routing to heaven" (99). That is, the person who dies in Varanasi escapes further cycles of reincarnation and death, achieving ultimate bliss (nirvana) at the moment of this death. McNally's dramaturgy reenacts this process by having Margaret and Katharine experience a death of the self in Varanasi, freeing them to experience in the following scene the indescribable beauty of the Taj Mahal, which was constructed to represent a heaven on earth; see Diana Preston and Michael Preston, Taj Mahal: Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire (New York: Walker, 2007), 193-203.

(27) Margaret's gradual transition from "bossy bitch" to compassionate friend is enacted in two episodes that space does not allow me to analyze in detail. First, the Japanese tourist's gift of a kimono leads Margaret to exclaim, "It's not warranted, such kindness" (52). The gift--like the spiritual sung at Gabriel's funeral by the African-American woman in front of whose car the boy had run (51)--is an example of McNally's understanding of grace, not as an unmerited deliverance bestowed upon humans by God, but as an act of comfort that one person can offer to another in a time of crisis. Second, although initially shocked by the steward's surreptitious groping of her breast while the train they ride passes through a dark tunnel, Margaret chooses not to file a complaint and averts another "Marabar Caves" (80)--that is, the critical moment of Anglo-Indian misunderstanding that ensures the tragic outcome of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. By practicing restraint in the face of another person's transgression, Margaret redeems herself for her earlier bad behavior on the airplane to Bombay with the intruder from coach. From this moment onward, no one will mistake the look in Margaret's eyes for cruelty.

(28) Benilde Montgomery, "A Perfect Ganesh: McNally's Carnival in India" in Terrence McNally: A Casebook, ed. Toby Silverman Zinman (New York: Garland, 1997), 135-45 (143).

(29) An essential teaching of the Ganesa Purana, John Grimes emphasizes, is "that one should not be carried away by the external appearance of things. The inner person is invisible to the physical eyes" (104). This is clearly an important element of the character of McNally's Ganesh. Not only does he see that being a "bossy bitch" is Margaret's clever defense against the tragic possibilities of life, hut by taking the form of so many different people with whom Margaret and Katharine interact on their trip, he dramatizes for the audience the fact that one should never take for granted the inner nature of the person with whom one is dealing. One of the most moving moments in the play occurs when Margaret, not wishing to diminish Katharine's grief over the death of Walter, remains silent in the face of Katharine's accusation, "You never lost a child" (84). Still, Margaret attempts to comfort her: "You're not alone, Kitty. I'm here. Another person, another woman, is here. Right here. Breathing the same air. Riding the same train. Looking out the window at the same timeless landscape. You are not alone. Even in your agony" (85). It is only because she is unable to see Margaret's "inner person" that Katharine continues to isolate herself in her grief. In an interview, McNally confirms that "Margaret respected ... [Katharine's] grief and privacy too much to sort of one-up her. I think maybe one day she does tell her, when they get back to Connecticut, hut to have told her there would have been on the order of, 'Oh, you think you have a bad life!' That was what was so wonderful about Margaret. She didn't have the need at that point to top her. She's allowing Catherine [sic] her grief"; see Terrence McNally, interview by Steven Drukman, in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, ed. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 332-45 (341-42).

(30) Grimes, 49.

(31) According to Grimes, "Another distinctive feature of Ganapati is his huge stomach. It is vast enough to contain the entire universe. It is the cosmic womb wherein may be found all that is. Thus Ganesa can digest all that life can present, he can stomach anything. This makes him not only a stithaprajna (one with great serenity and equanimity) but also one able to swallow all the sorrows of the universe. This is another way of demonstrating his protective powers" (83). The belief that "all men are divine" is at the heart of McNally's Corpus Christi; see Raymond-Jean Frontain, "'All Men Are Divine': Religious Mystery and Homosexual Identity in Terrence McNally's Corpus Christie," in Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain, 2nd ed. (New York: Harrington Park, 2003), 231-57.

(32) "Edited Transcript of the [c] Times Auditorium Event Held on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 1994," Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, McNally Archive 58, no. 2 (unpublished TS). McNally repeats the anecdote in numerous interviews; see, for example, Judith Weintraub, "Terrence McNally's Stage Directions," Washington Post, 26 September 1994, D4.

(33) Terrence McNally, interview by Raymond-Jean Frontain, 11-12 August 2009, Bridgehampton, N.Y.

(34) Terrence McNally, "A Fortnight in India," Horizon, September 1987, 2.

(35) Ibid.

(36) On the history of McNally's relationship with Coco and Drivas, the circumstances of the men's deaths, and their possible influence on McNally as he was writing A Perfect Ganesh, see Raymond-Jean Frontain, "James Coco, AIDS, and the Genesis of A Perfect Ganesh," ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 23 (2010): 250-58.

(37) Richard Corliss, "Success Is His Best Revenge," Time, 23 August 1993, 73.

(38) Montgomery analyzes some of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque features of A Perfect Ganesh. She also ably addresses the religious significance of Ganesh.

(39) Preston and Preston, 66.

(40) Ibid., 5.

(41) Ibid., 10.