The great American playwright Terrence McNally lived on 9th Street in New York City’s Village for 24 years, many of them with his husband, theatre producer Tom Kirdahy, until McNally died of Covid in early 2020. Today Kirdahy, with the support of city councilmembers Eric Bottcher and Carlina Rivera, alongside several theatre luminaries, made his late husband’s name a permanent fixture of the neighborhood with the unveiling of Terrence McNally Way, a sign on the northeast corner of 9th Street and University Place, next to the building McNally and Kirdahy called home, just blocks from Washington Square Park. As Santino DeAngelo, executive director of the Terrence McNally Foundation, put it in opening remarks at today’s ceremony, “When we need a sign from Terrence, we now have one.”
The Tony-winning author of the plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class, and librettist of the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, McNally was born in Florida and mostly raised in Texas, but happily lived in New York City from his college days at Columbia. He wrote about his love for his neighborhood in the 2008 play Unusual Acts of Devotion, which Kirdahy quoted at today’s ceremony: “I fell in love with my apartment the moment I opened the door. It’s a unique part of New York, these few little blocks…It’s New York as a place for doers, achievers, people who are involved. Not nostalgic. Not lazy. There’s a briskness to everybody’s step. I feel at home here—you know it when you’ve found a place that you belong.”
Indeed, the hourlong presentation in the blocked-off street included an early moment of only-in-New-York dissonance, as a local homeless man briefly mounted the stage to accost DeAngelo and swear at the gathered throng. “New York—we’re all about drama,” DeAngelo quipped afterward.
Bottcher, the neighborhood’s city councilmember, spoke to the way that McNally’s work resonated for him as a gay man, saying that McNally “didn’t just write plays, he wrote possibilities.” Kirdahy picked up on the theme later when he twice repeated the sentence, “At a time when the arts are under attack in this country, books are being banned, and LGBTQ+ rights are being eroded, honoring a fearless queer artist feels particularly meaningful.”
John Kander said a few words of tribute by recorded audio, and three performers memorably performed McNally monologues: Jonathan Groff with an excerpt from And Things That Go Bump in the Night, Francis Jue with a scene from Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Donna Murphy with the imperious closing monologue of Master Class. After the sign was unveiled, Caissie Levy and Brandon Uranowitz, stars of a Ragtime revival slated for this fall at Lincoln Center Theater, sang “Our Children,” and Brian Stokes Mitchell, star of the original Ragtime, gave a rousing rendition of “Make Them Hear You,” as composer Stephen Flaherty accompanied them.
On hand for the unveiling were Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime’s lyricist) and Lear deBessonet (who’s directing the fall revival), as well as Rachel Chavkin, Will Davis, Matthew Broderick, John Slattery, Stephen Bogardus, Jenny Gersten, David Staller, Lin-Manual Miranda, and Luis Miranda. Kirdahy also shouted out his 94-year-old mother and members of McNally’s family who’d flown in from Texas. The two things McNally loved most about his adopted city, Kirdahy recalled, were the theatre and the people, “which to him were really the same thing. I think he viewed people as inherently theatrical.”
