Having been involved in NY theatre since 1967, watching Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life stirred up decades of memories. Some of them involve Terrence. I can’t claim to be a close friend, but he and his work have been a constant presence for decades.

He probably doesn’t remember it, but I played organ for the off-off-Broadway production of his play about alcoholic country-western singers, Whiskey at St. Clement’s.

The first show I ever saw at Yale Rep was a play of his called The Tubs which featured my Second City friend Anthony Holland. It was set in a gay bath house and, though it had funny passages, it was a fairly somber play about isolation. Terrence subsequently rewrote it as a flat-out farce, The Ritz. (Robert Brustein, the producer at Yale at the time, harrumphed at its transformation into something more audience-friendly.)

I was at a playwrights conference in North Carolina when a draft of (I think) the first act of Love! Valour! Compassion! was first read. Even that early taste suggested it would be a major play.

One night, I found myself passing a diner on West 23rd Street and saw him and Wendy Wasserstein through the window. I waved, and they signaled I should come in and join them. We talked theatre, of course. I thought, “Isn’t that cool, big-deal playwrights still shmooze and debate over coffee!” I had no sense they were involved. (I didn’t learn that until I read the biography of Wendy. According to that, Terrence was game to go public with their relationship, but Wendy was not.)

In 2001, Terrence and I were both in Chicago putting up new plays. I seem to remember that at the time he hadn’t had much experience with the town, so, since I consider myself a Chicago boy, I thought it would be appropriate to invite him to dinner at the Four Farthings and give him a little background about the history of the theatre scene there. After dinner, we walked south through the Triangle neighborhood and ended up in the lobby of Second City, which I thought might be meaningful to him given his connection with Elaine May. (You may remember I wrote a book about the history of Second City called Something Wonderful Right Away.) We ran into a guy there who invited us to a musical he had written; it was being given a performance late that night in the studio theatre at Chicago Shakespeare. Under his breath, Terrence asked me if we actually wanted to do that, and I told him I knew the guy as a pianist for Second City and thought he was talented. So we went to see what was later titled Melancholy Baby, a show about second-rate Broadway songwriters trying to make a musical out of Hamlet featuring Jack McBreyer as Hamlet and Alexandra Billings as Gertrude. We laughed our asses off. The guy who invited us was Jeff Richmond, who, with his wife, Tina Fey, later wrote the musical Mean Girls.

Otherwise, it’s been mostly friendly hellos as we run into each other in the theatre, and the occasional email of congratulations.

The film, which will shortly run on the American Masters series, is filled with images of friends and lovers and the community it’s a treat to be a part of. Some of it is a little painful to watch. There’s Marin Mazzie talking about working with Terrence on Ragtime, and I think of the last time I saw her, which was in the lobby of CSC after her performance in a play by Terrence called Fire and Air. She radiated joy (as usual) and we talked briefly about a project that we’d been kicking around doing together. I was blind-sided by her death. In retrospect, I think she knew that it was the last conversation we would have.

There’s also a clip of Terrence sharing a stage on a panel with Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson, both friends and both gone (and both in my book, What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing).

“Jesu, the days that we have seen.” “No more of that, Master Shallow.”