At turns funny and powerful, MOTHERS AND SONS portrays a woman who pays an unexpected visit to the New York apartment of her late son's partner, who is now married to another man and has a young son. Challenged to face how society has changed around her, generations collide as she revisits the past and begins to see the life her son might have led.

In Some Men, a multi-generational journey through gay life in America, McNally uses interwoven vignettes to revisit the same characters at different points in their lives, addressing such issues as coming out, marriage, adoption, the military and the AIDS crisis.

"Terrence McNally is one of our most original and audacious dramatists, and one of our funniest."--New Yorker Since his first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, which premiered in 1965, McNally has proven himself to be a trailblazing figure and unique voice in American theater, known for his exploration of gay themes and his chronicling of America's changing social attitudes over the past fifty years. His thirty-three plays, nine musicals, three operas, and seven scripts for film and television, are a testament to his astonishing commitment to writing. In Selected Plays, for the very first time, McNally collects a set of eight plays that he considers the most important of his oeuvre, including the Tony-nominated Mothers and Sons and the critically acclaimed And Away We Go, neither of which have been previously published. Introducing each play with a personal essay that recounts an anecdote or discusses an aspect of the play that proceeds it, McNally himself frames his own life in the theater. Selected Plays is a landmark publication, a memoir in plays from one of America's most highly regarded and best-loved playwrights.

THE STORY: SOME MEN is Tony Award-winner Terrence McNally at his best. Often funny and sometimes touching, SOME MEN looks at same-sex life and love against a background of some of the events that shaped the last century.

Terrence McNally’s canon of plays, books for musicals and opera libretti possesses such a breadth of subject matter and diversity of dramatic modes that critics have had difficulty assessing his accomplishment. This book is the first critical study to identify the four major stages of McNally’s development in terms of his understanding of how theater helps the modern person trapped in a seemingly profane existence to find a gateway to the transcendent. Drawing upon such diverse religious thinkers as Martin Buber, Mircea Eliade, Ilia Delio and Carter Heyward, Frontain analyzes the evolution of McNally’s understanding of grace, not as a gift bestowed by an all-powerful deity upon a desperate soul, but as the unwarranted—and, thus, all the more unusual—“act of devotion” (McNally’s phrase) that one person performs for another. By seeking to foment community, most importantly at the height of the AIDS pandemic, McNally’s theater itself proves to be a channel of grace. McNally’s greatest success is shown to be the creation of a theater of empathy and compassion in contradistinction to Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and Albee’s Americanization of the theater of the absurd.

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.