The Gay & Lesbian Review

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TERRENCE MCNALLY has become the Ameri-
can theater’s great poet of the urgency of inter-
personal relationships. “We gotta connect. We
just have to. Or we die,” Johnny warns in
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune—a
play that movingly defines “a blowjob [as] a
sensual metaphor for mutual acceptance.” Roughly from 1985
through 1995—that is, at the height of the AIDS pandemic in
America—McNally penned one extraordinary play after an-
other in which he addressed the global trauma in terms of the
human need for connection and the obstacles that we create for
ourselves in connecting with another person: The Lisbon Travi-
ata (1985), Frankie and Johnny (1987), Lips Together, Teeth
Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), and, of course, the crit-
ically acclaimed and enormously popular Love! Valour! Com-
passion! (1994). More recently, he has celebrated in Some Men
(2007) the bonds that gay men create both intentionally and un-
intentionally across decades and generations; the discovery in
Deuce (2007) of a heroic partnership between two long-retired
women tennis players; and in Unusual Acts
of Devotion (2008), the small, life-affirming
acts that members of a lower West-side
apartment building quietly perform for one
another.
Throughout his œuvre, the two classes of
people who seem to have the greatest difficulty connecting are
mothers and their gay sons. In And Things That Go Bump in the
Night (1965), McNally’s first professionally produced play, the
tyrannical Ruby mocks her son Sigfrid for bringing home a male
sexual partner for that evening’s game of “Get the Guest” and for
writing a poem about an eagle’s desire to break free of earthly
bonds and soar. Similarly, in A Perfect Ganesh, Katharine
Brynne is inconsolable after her son Walter is beaten to death on
the street late one night by five African-American males trawl-
ing a gay neighborhood for fags to bash. Yet while he was alive,
she had resented deeply Walter’s orientation and had objected
to his referring to the apartment that he shared with his male
partner as a “home.” Traveling in India, she meets an HIV-pos-
itive gay man who ruefully acknowledges having been similarly
rejected by his own mother.
In Corpus Christi (1998), Mary is indifferent to the trials of
Joshua, her gay teenage son, and proves to be anything but the
archetypal loving mother who holds her infant son on her knee
or sorrowfully gathers to her bosom his adult corpse. Even
Chloe in Lips Together , who gets along famously with the gay
men with whom she performs in community theater, admits that
she would never want one of her pre-pubescent sons to turn out
ESSAY
Truth and Reconciliation
RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of
Central Arkansas.
gay. The one thing that all children want to hear, Chloe instructs
her childless sister-in-law, is “that they’re loved. That they’re
safe.” But in McNally’s world, this is the one message that a
mother seems to find impossible to deliver to her gay son.
In 1988, Andre’s Mother bore witness to a significant mo-
ment in American social history as the country reeled with pain
and confusion at the height of the AIDS pandemic. First pre-
sented on stage at the Manhattan Theatre Club as an eight-
minute vignette that was part of an evening of short plays titled
Urban Blight, Andre’s Mother was expanded by McNally into a
fifty-minute Emmy Award-winning teleplay that first aired in
1990 as part of PBS’s American Playhouse. It starred Richard
Thomas as the all too eager-to-please Cal, and the magisterial
Sada Thompson in the title role, on whose silent face played her
character’s tumultuous interior drama as stoical confusion min-
gled with angry resentment and dissolved into unspeakable grief.
Although the play clearly faults Andre’s Mother (she has no
other name in the original text) for having been so judgmental of
Andre’s sexuality that she lost her chance to have a genuine re-
lationship with him while he was alive, the
teleplay resonated for female viewers whose
sons were ill or had died of AIDS. The Mc-
Nally Archive in the Harry Ransom Human-
ities Research Center in Austin, Texas,
preserves a file of letters that McNally re-
ceived during the months following the initial broadcast in which
women thanked him for voicing so eloquently the pain of moth-
ers who had no idea how to talk with their sons about the lat-
ter’s sexuality, or how to care for them in their final illness. The
letter-writers often signed themselves simply “Peter’s Mother”
or “Michael’s Mother.”
McNally’s latest play, Mothers and Sons, is essentially a
continuation of the 1988 AIDS drama only twenty years later.
Cal Porter receives an unexpected visit from Katharine Gerard
(Andre’s Mother now has a name), last seen at the memorial
service that Andre’s friends were holding for him in Central
Park. Then he’d struggled to break through Mrs. Gerard’s angry
and disapproving silence, eventually leaving her alone to grieve.
At the climax of Mothers and Sons—which enjoyed a trial run
this summer at Bucks County Playhouse and begins previews
on Broadway at the Golden Theatre as of February 23—Cal fi-
nally loses his self-control in the face of Mrs. Gerard’s stony
façade, telling her: “You should have held me that day in the
park [when I embraced you as I said goodbye]. ... I wanted you
to hold me back. Jesus Christ, woman, reach out to someone.
Let someone in.” Exasperated by her seemingly inexhaustible
fund of hauteur and bitterness, Cal accepts that they will never
share common ground and finally begins ushering her out of his
apartment by helping her into her coat. But, the stage directions
record, “her arms stay at her side. Awkwardly, her coat over her
Mothers and Sons
describes the sea-change
in American gay life from
1993 to 2013.
32 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE