Terrence McNally doesn't like labels.
"I think we do a disservice when we think of any minority group as 'them,' " the playwright says by phone from his New York home. "It's too easy to call me a gay playwright, or dismiss the characters in my plays as stereotypes. I try to write about individuals. If the work is good, it reaches many people."
McNally's work over the last 40 years has included four Tony award-winning productions, ranging from the books for the musicals "Ragtime" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" to the plays "Master Class" and "Love! Valour! Compassion!"
"Some Men," which opens tonight in a SpeakEasy Stage Company production, focuses on the historical forces throughout the 20th century that have brought a group of nine gay men together at a same-sex wedding. But McNally says he was more interested in exploring the individual characters and how they got there than some big theme of gay American men in the 20th century.
"I'm not interested in sloganeering," he says. "I wouldn't write a play about the right to gay marriage. When I was first approached to write the play (by the artistic director of the Philadelphia Theatre Company) the suggestion was that I explore the relationship between gay men and divas, but we dropped that after about a minute and a half."
The play is structured as a series of independent scenes that move back and forth in time with the connections between the men becoming clear as the story develops. "I'd never written in this short scene style before," McNally says, "and connecting the forces, strands and trends was a challenge. You have to plant the seeds very carefully."
McNally says his own experience observing the gay scene over the past 50 years has given him some insight into the characters.
"I came to New York as a 17-year-old in 1956," he says, "and gay bars didn't even exist. When they did appear, they had painted windows and you had to go down a steep, dark staircase to get to them. The notion of the gay lifestyle going from very furtive to open is something that had to be acknowledged. Stonewall [the 1969 New York riots in which gays resisted police harassment] is the single most important event in gay culture, and certainly the im pact of AIDS on the gay community cannot be ignored, but I had to make choices that would bring me back to these characters and their story."
Director Paul Daigneault says he was struck by how well McNally knows these men. "He has a lot of insight because he's lived through much of the period he's writing about, but he avoids sentimentality," Daigneault says. "Drag queens and show-tune queens have become stereotypes, but the way he chooses to build the scene around them doesn't slip into cliche."
Although specific music was not required for the play (with the exception of two songs), Daigneault says he's enjoyed choosing songs to help with transitions and set the mood for each scene. "The cast all came in with suggestions and they include Mama Cass, Erasure, the Scissor Sisters, 'Surrey With the Fringe on Top' [from 'Oklahoma!'], and Nirvana," Daigneault says. "It's not what you'd expect."
McNally says he looks forward to seeing the SpeakEasy production tomorrow, but it will be a whirlwind trip. Tonight in New York there's a workshop performance of "Catch Me If You Can," the Steven Spielberg film that McNally, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman are turning into a musical. Nathan Lane is in the Tom Hanks role, and McNally has to be ready for notes.
"But I love coming to Boston," he says, "and it's always interesting to see what other actors bring to the roles."
"Some Men" plays tonight through March 29 at the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts. $42.-$50. Today only from 12-6 p.m. all seats by phone or walk up, $25. 617-933-8600, bostontheatrescene.com.
Notes
Actress and playwright M. Lynda Robinson and filmmaker and playwright John Ronan bring their West End Theatre plays from Gloucester to Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Ronan's "The Yeats Game," a romantic comedy about two 50ish couples, runs March 26-30, and Robinson's "Wives," a mini-marathon of eight plays that explores the stories behind wedding customs, runs April 2-6. Tickets: $25. 866-811-4111, bu.edu/bpt.
