From Texas to Broadway

McNally was born November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Hubert Arthur and Dorothy Katharine (Rapp) McNally, two transplanted New Yorkers from Irish Catholic backgrounds. His parents ran a seaside bar and grill called The Pelican Club, but after a hurricane destroyed the establishment, the family relocated briefly to Port Chester, New York, then to Dallas, Texas, and finally to Corpus Christi, Texas. There Hubert McNally purchased and managed a Schlitz beer distributorship, and McNally attended W.B. Ray High School.

Despite his distance from New York City, McNally’s parents enjoyed Broadway musicals. When McNally was eight years old, his parents took him to see Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, and on a subsequent outing, McNally saw Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I. McNally later said: “When I saw On the Town, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: ‘That’s where I want to live.’ I’ve never regretted it.”

In high school McNally was encouraged to write by a gifted English teacher, Maurine McElroy (1913–2005). He dedicated both his collection Apple Pie (1968) and Frankie and Johnny to her.

Columbia College

He enrolled at Columbia College in 1956. There he especially enjoyed Andrew Chiappe’s two-semester course on Shakespeare in which students read Shakespeare’s plays in roughly the order of their composition. He joined the Boar’s Head Society and wrote Columbia’s annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L. Kleban and was directed by Michael P. Kahn. He graduated in 1960 with a B.A. cum laude in English and membership in Phi Beta Kappa Society.

In 1961, McNally was hired by novelist John Steinbeck to tutor his two teenage sons as the Steinbeck family took a cruise around the world. On the cruise McNally completed a draft of what became the opening act of And Things That Go Bump in the Night. Steinbeck asked McNally to write the libretto for Here’s Where I Belong, a musical version of the novel East of Eden.

Six Decades of Theatre

AIDS, Activism & Human Connection

The rapid spread of AIDS fundamentally changed McNally’s writing. After the failure of Broadway, Broadway in 1978 and living briefly in Hollywood, he returned to New York City and formed an artistic relationship with Manhattan Theatre Club. McNally’s work during this period became increasingly focused on the AIDS crisis and its devastating impact on the gay community.

In 1990, McNally won an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Miniseries or Special for Andre’s Mother, a drama about a woman coping with her son’s death from AIDS. A year later, in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, two married couples spend the Fourth of July weekend at a summer house on Fire Island. They are all afraid to use the pool given that its owner has just died of AIDS.

Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), which examined the relationships of eight gay men, marked a significant shift in how gay lives were portrayed on Broadway. The play won McNally his second Tony Award. Mothers and Sons (2014), an expansion of Andre’s Mother, marked the first time a legally wed gay couple was portrayed on Broadway.

For McNally, the most important function of theatre was to create community and bridge rifts opened between people by differences in religion, race, gender, and particularly sexual orientation. His work centered on the difficulties of and urgent need for human connection.

Awards & Recognition

Personal Life & Relationships

Early Relationships

In his early years in New York City, McNally’s interest in theatre brought him to a party where, departing, he shared a cab with Edward Albee, who had recently written The Zoo Story and The Sandbox. They functioned as a couple for over four years during which Albee wrote The American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

McNally was frustrated by Albee’s lack of openness about his sexuality. McNally later said: “I became invisible when press was around or at an opening night. I knew it was wrong. It’s so much work to live that way.” After his relationship with Albee, McNally entered into a long-term relationship with the actor and director Robert Drivas. Drivas and McNally broke up as a couple in 1976; they remained close friends until Drivas died of AIDS-related complications ten years later.

Marriage to Tom Kirdahy

McNally was partnered to Tom Kirdahy, a Broadway producer and a former civil rights attorney for not-for-profit AIDS organizations, following a civil union ceremony in Vermont on December 20, 2003. They married in Washington, D.C., on April 6, 2010. In celebration of the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states, they renewed their vows at New York City Hall with Mayor Bill de Blasio, Kirdahy’s college roommate, officiating on June 26, 2015.