Success Is His Best Revenge

By RICHARD CORLISS

As a lad in Texas in the 1950s, Terrence McNally learned his catechism. But he may never have heard a commandment expressed more fervently than the prayer he has written in his new play, A Perfect Ganesh:

"Look! Attack things with your eyes. See them fiercely. Listen! Hear everything, ignore nothing. Smell! Breathe deeper than you've ever dared. Experience. Be. But, above all, remember. Carve adamantine letters in your brain: 'This I have seen and done and known.' Amen.

"No, above all, feel! Take my heart and do with it what you will."

That's fine, reckless advice for any person, any writer. The surprise is that McNally, 54, took his own dare. He is, after all, best known for the zippy romance Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (which became a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino) and the funny-poignant Lips Together, Teeth Apart (which is now playing in Los Angeles). Among his dozens of plays are daft farces (The Ritz, Bad Habits), an Emmy-winning TV play (Andre's Mother) and a clever sitcom (Mama Malone), but nothing so eloquent, capacious and true as A Perfect Ganesh.

In Ganesh, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, McNally sends two American women to India because they "heard it could heal" and has them face troubling truths about the cancer of prejudice and privilege inside the nicest people. Guided by the cheerful Hindu god Ganesha, the women learn to recognize the illness and -- not to cure it, but something harder -- to live with it.

"Terrence has the rhythm of life," says Chita Rivera, star of two musicals (The Rink and the current Tony winner Kiss of the Spider Woman) for which McNally wrote the books. "He's musical. He writes to the rhythm of the person. If he knows you, he'll go to the core, right down to the gut." John Tillinger, director of McNally's recent plays, sees a flowering in the veteran playwright. "In his earlier work," he says, "he wanted to write about deep feelings but felt he didn't have the right to do it. Who would have guessed that the acceptance, the healing, the mystical philosophy of India would be so ( fully understood by a man from Corpus Christi?"

In McNally's Texas family, his father Hubert was a wholesale beverage distributor; mother Dorothy worked as an accountant. In school, Terrence's passion was opera. "An Ursuline nun played records for us," he says, "and I loved it from the start." He is a noted opera prince -- a regular panelist on the Metropolitan Opera radio quiz -- with a huge record collection: "I could never play it all in my lifetime." From this fascination came his higher- than-camp opera fantasia, The Lisbon Traviata (1985), and a play in the works, L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age), about Bellini's relationship with sisters who are rival divas.

He worked for a Corpus Christi newspaper on summer vacations from Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa, 1960), but was soon disenchanted. "I saw that electronic journalism was the future," he says, "and I didn't want to be that kind of journalist. I was old-fashioned; I wrote on a pad." So he traveled on a grant, started a novel and wrote a play, which got him into the Actors Studio. He worked as a stage manager there too. "I did a lot of moving and sweeping," he says. "But I also saw how some great professionals worked, how they shaped, rehearsed, rewrote."

McNally was then living with Edward Albee, who reputedly based the description of the imaginary son in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on him. In 1965, two years after the couple had broken up, McNally saw his own first full-length play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, go kerflop on Broadway. He still smarts from the experience. On opening night, just before curtain time, he spotted playwright Jean Kerr and her critic husband Walter. "She said, 'Well, let's go see what his boyfriend has written.' The critics weren't reviewing a play by a new American playwright; they were seeing what Albee's boyfriend had written. That was pretty devastating to me, frankly." He got some small revenge by writing a Walter and Jean Kerr joke into his inside-Broadway comedy, It's Only a Play.

Success is the best revenge. McNally, who has achieved much, helps others as vice president of the Dramatists Guild; this fall he launches a playwriting department at the Juilliard School. For McNally, success means finding a unique voice that people have to hear. In Ganesh his subject is the universal caste system, the need to hate those of another shade or sexuality. If his characters judge too quickly or hold a grudge too long, it is because they are victims as well. Their hearts are bruised; India will open them to life.

As a gay man, McNally knows how prejudice feels. As a human being, he knows how to feel prejudice. Ganesh sees the disease from both sides -- and from above, from the perch of accumulated wisdom, where forgiveness is possible. "There's a lot of hatred in our society," he says. "We're being devoured by it, and I think we have to look at it." In A Perfect Ganesh, McNally shows playgoers the heart where prejudice resides, and allows them to experience, remember and, above all, feel.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York