“Lifetime achievement,” said the writer Terrence McNally at the Tony Awards last weekend. “Not a moment too soon.”
That dry opening joke by the 80-year-old author of such dramatic masterworks as “Master Class,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and the criminally underappreciated “Mothers and Sons,” not to mention the books to the musicals “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and “The Full Monty,” and the libretto to the opera “Dead Man Walking” and countless other screenplays, teleplays and other works, was about the most awkward gag of the night.
Why? Clearly the ever-impish and self-aware McNally was acknowledging his own mortality. And in America, at this moment, nothing seems to make an awards show crowd less comfortable. It’s hard to come out in your fancy clothes and roar for youth and change, to take down the old guard, when the old guard is not necessarily looking so good.
McNally had taken a while to walk out on stage, leaving the award’s presenter, Karen Olivo, to nervously stare at her monitor. And he came out with attached breathing apparatus, tubes dangling, as if with a certain intentionality. In play after play, McNally wrote about gay Americans confronting early deaths that could have been avoided, had people outside the theater industry given more of a darn. His own appearance put that back in mind. Broadway artists love to complain about the grip of the patriarchy. But an inconvenient truth is that the patriarchy — if you mean straight, white, WASP-ish men — never gave two shakes about the theater. This industry was never banking, or even Hollywood.
Broadway always was the home of outsiders. In fact, Broadway largely was the creation of outsiders, especially gay men. They were the ones who composed most of the musicals, choreographed most of the dance numbers, wrote a whole lot of the plays. They ran things, too. And they were most of the critics. (They still are).
This remarkable community, often under duress, sometimes working while dying, built a stable, billion-dollar industry for the rest of America and, as the now-cliched Tonys speech about the kids watching at home goes, in the process made a lot of people in the hinterlands feel less alone.
They taught us all how to love. And, yes, how to die. For, as Tony Kushner once said to me, we only learn how to deal with grief and loss by hearing the survival stories of others.
It’s fair enough to argue that much must now change for all kinds of good reasons, that opportunities must be broadened, but the lack of gratitude to these forefathers expressed by many young progressives is nothing short of breathtaking. There is a chronic misunderstanding of history. The Broadway establishment has always been composed of rebels and outcasts — without whom, the misery of the era of AIDS would have been so very much worse. These gay men saved lives.
But back to McNally, a lifesaver himself.
Many an outre fashion statement was photographed and breathlessly described at the Tonys. But nothing shuts people up like a breathing tube. No one wants to tweet about that. Almost no one did. Especially since McNally appeared in stark contrast to an image of the writer that had shown up a few weeks earlier in a glossy New York Times Style Magazine shoot, which had made him look 20 years younger.
Now you might well have watched the Tony Awards on Sunday night (assuming you weren’t part of the 14 percent of viewers of last year’s ceremony who had dropped away) without seeing what I am describing. McNally’s award, and thus his speech, did not appear in the broadcast portion of the evening, which tells you right there how much we value lifetime achievement these days.
Of course, lifetime achievement awards are complicated for artists. Upon receiving one, David Mamet once said to me: “The idea of life achievement only means one thing to the artist. ‘Don’t you think that’s just about enough?’ The healthy artist would respond, ‘I’ll be the judge of that. At some point, I’ll leave. But you’ll have to kill me.’ “
Mamet was exactly right.
But I found what McNally had to say (I was watching it live) to be far and away the most powerful part of the evening. He did not quip like Mamet; clearly, McNally had decided this was the moment to define his life.
The speech was little more than three minutes. Yet this was the most beautiful recounting of one of this nation’s most distinguished artistic careers.
“Theater changes hearts,” he said, struggling to fully breathe his way through his words. “That secret place where we all truly live.”
McNally found time to speak of early failure and how John Steinbeck told him to get back on his horse: “If you ain’t been throwed, you ain’t rode.” He recalled how much the artists of a previous generation had meant to him as a small boy. He revealed that his father, after watching “Death of a Salesman” and seeing a traumatic vision of what happens to so many of us later in an American life in an American business, had quit his job and struck out on his own.
He talked about his pride in “softening the hearts” of unforgiving parents, which is about as noble a quest for an artist of any one could imagine. He told young artists that he was part of a writing club with open admission: “The only dues are your mind, your soul and your guts. All of you.”
“The world needs artists more than ever,” McNally said, “to remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are.”
And he finished with a quote from the last act of “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s late, great world of personal legacy: “O brave new world that has such people in it.”
I thought at first McNally was talking about the theater in the self-congratulatory way theater people often do.
But no. He had a broader purview.
“Shakespeare was talking to all of us,” McNally said. “No one does it alone.”
Right. Whatever you do.
What an achievement. What a life.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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