Tony Award-winning Broadway and off-Broadway playwright Terrence McNally, who was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, on November 3, 1938, died in Sarasota FL on March 24, 2020 of complications from COVID-19. He is survived by his husband Tom Kirdahy, with whom he lived in Manhattan and married in Washington D.C. in 2010. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio presided at a marriage re-affirmation ceremony for McNally and Kirdahy outside City Hall in June 2015. McNally was a grand marshal of the city’s Pride March in 2003.
McNally was the author of such plays as “Love! Valour! Compassion!” about a group of gay men from New York spending summer holidays in Dutchess County, “Master Class” about Maria Callas and the classes that she taught at the Juilliard School, “The Lisbon Traviata” about a pirated Callas recording, “The Ritz” set in a bathhouse, “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” and “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” and wrote the books for musicals including “Ragtime,” “The Rink,” and “Kiss of the Spiderwoman.” Nathan Lane, Zoe Caldwell, and Chita Rivera are among the performers who starred in these works.