McNally is back in Philly with 'Mothers and Sons'

Terrence McNally plays are like city buses: They sweep by, may not take you where you think you're going, and, when absent for a while, suddenly arrive in droves and from all directions.

Like now. His musical-theater librettos are or will soon be playing to audiences at the Bristol Riverside Theater (Ragtime), the Eagle Theatre in Hammonton (Catch Me if You Can), and up the road on Broadway (It's Only a Play and The Visit). In the pipeline is a backstage operatic comedy titled Great Scott in collaboration with composer Jake Heggie.

More unadulterated McNally is at the Philadelphia Theatre Company with Mothers and Sons, which runs through March 8. It piggybacks onto his 1990 Andre's Mother, picking up with the gay community in a current, sunnier time, with gay men who are married with children - though wrestling with their own PTSD from having survived the AIDS epidemic.

"Being gay isn't a situation that you write about and then are done with," McNally, 76, said the other day from the Manhattan apartment he shares with his husband, Thomas Kirdahy. "There are many fewer stones in the shoe than 10 years ago. Which I'm happy about. Great writing can be fueled by great happiness and contentment and harmony. You don't have to be angry to paint, compose, or write. You just have to be human."

If there's a common thread amid his huge range of subject matter, from womanizing con man of Catch Me if You Can to vengeful billionairess of The Visit, it's that no situation is too intense for offhanded humor. In Mothers and Sons, two characters who wouldn't seem to belong in the same play, much less in the same scene, stare ahead out the same window onto Central Park, trying to make conversation through clenched teeth.

The woman is one Katharine Gerard of Dallas, wearing her mink like armor, having dropped in on Cal, the man who was coupled with her grown son when he died of AIDS many years before. Unfinished business? Tons of it, plus new inner conflicts bubbling up when Cal's younger husband, Will, arrives home with their son.

Written in roughly two weeks ("I'm not one to sit staring at a blank screen," McNally says), the play is a model of outward simplicity, but the sort that masks a vast underground network of emotion.

"I don't write a lot of plays that take place in living rooms," McNally said, perhaps in reference to his Love! Valour! Compassion!, which had outdoor guys taking off their clothes. "Some say Katharine is the villain of the play. I don't see her that way at all. She's tragic. By the end, there's a slight crack in her facade. There are people who are stuck in the past with a rigid idea of what is right. Her tragedy is that she's on the wrong side of history. But there's a crack in her facade by the end."

She's not a bad person, he continues. "She is who she is."

Naturally, theatergoers will wonder what happens after the emotionally inconclusive final curtain. Does she fly off to Rome on vacation and disappear forever? Does she move to New York to become a foster grandmother? Says McNally, "I don't worry about my characters too much after the play has ended."

But he knows what will become of the generations coming up behind him: "They're going to be free of the awful prejudices of homophobia that have crippled us."

The fact that Mothers and Sons is his 49th play or libretto since 1962 is remarkable enough, particularly considering how much McNally works on plays after their first incarnation. Master Class, which famously began in Philadelphia in 1995, was a fluke: Hardly a word changed between here and Broadway. But others?

Some start out rather shrill (Some Men in 2006) and with out-of-control length (Golden Age in 2009) - at least as seen in their first versions presented in Philadelphia. Typically, Mothers and Sons is a showcase for a senior actress, having been written for Tyne Daly partly in gratitude for her fine work in a revival of Master Class.

First seen in June 2013 at Bucks County Playhouse, the play went on to a fairly well-received Broadway run the following year and now returns to the region via the Philadelphia Theatre Company, with a different star, Emmy-winning actress Michael Learned, best known for The Waltons.

Since Bucks County, the play has grown by 15 minutes - a significant piece of theatrical real estate. "But there's no change of plot," said McNally. "It was generally fleshed out."

Even Neil Simon didn't maintain this kind of work ethic and malleability into his 70s. McNally's lung cancer diagnosis in 2001 and its recurrence in 2007 briefly curtailed his work, though the one significant gap was between his 1975 hit The Ritz and 1982's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.

During that period, he was at a Stephen Sondheim party, so drunk that he spilled a drink on Lauren Bacall ("who tore me a new one," he recalls) and then had the gentlest of interventions from Angela Lansbury.

"I owe Angela a lot. She said, 'Can I tell you something? Every time I see you, you've had too much to drink.' It was very cool then to smoke too much and drink too much. She said it very nicely and caringly - out of kindness and love and concern. I thought long and hard, and shortly after that, I stopped drinking."

Interestingly, his first sobriety play, Frankie and Johnny, talks about a character's mother who moved to Philadelphia and resumed drinking. The oft-quoted line is, "They say Philadelphia will do that to you."

But not to him. "I doubt that I'd be alive if I continued drinking," he said. "I've certainly lost writer friends to alcohol. There's a whole romantic notion about a drunk writer. I saw Tennessee Williams on TV, and he was so pathetically drunk that he was incoherent. And it was so sad. Truman Capote was so stoned that it became a freak show.

"They didn't have an Angela Lansbury."

Mothers and Sons

Presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company through March 8 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre,

480 S. Broad St.

Tickets: $46-$59.

215-985-0420 or philadelphaitheatrecompany.org. EndText