Michael Terrence McNally was born on Nov. 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Fla., where his parents, Hubert and Dorothy (Rapp) McNally, had a bar and grill on the beach. During World War II and just after, the family lived in Port Chester, N.Y., and his paternal grandfather would take him to the theater.
Mr. McNally, the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright whose outpouring of work for the theater dramatized and domesticated gay life across five decades, died on Tuesday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 81.
The cause was complications of the coronavirus, according to his husband, Tom Kirdahy. Mr. McNally had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and had overcome lung cancer. He died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.
Mr. McNally and Tom Kirdahy were joined in a civil union in 2003 and married in 2010. He is also survived by a brother, Peter.
In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Mr. McNally recalled an encounter at Stephen Sondheim’s 50th-birthday party in 1980 that helped him shed a personal demon, a turning point in his playwriting. He was drinking heavily at the time and had been for years.

By 1982, with “Frankie and Johnny,” the course of his career had changed, his vision having deepened and darkened from the zaniness and absurdity of his earlier work. The play about melancholy lovers — Frankie is “a B.L.T. down sort of person,” who thinks Johnny is “looking for someone a little more pheasant under glass” — introduces what would become Mr. McNally’s mature theme: that tragedy and comedy not only coexist but also, like all of us on earth, cohabit.

As posted in the New York Times – Those We’ve Lost