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A new production of The Ritz, Terrence McNally's frothy comedy about a straight man hiding from the mob in a gay bathhouse, opens Roundabout's season at Studio 54.
An interview by Randy Gener
Terrence McNally has written one true knockabout, knee-slapping farce, the 1975 sex comedy The Ritz. Looking back, he thanks director and comedienne Elaine May, who staged his play, Next, in 1969, for a key comedy-writing tip that made The Ritz such a splash. “Elaine always seemed uninterested in the dialogue but very interested in what the characters were doing,” recalls McNally. “She loved physical behavior, and farce is physical behavior.”
With ease, grace, confidence, and wit, McNally has created a diverse chorus of characters to people New York City stages in such acclaimed plays and musicals as Master Class and Love! Valour! Compassion! (both of which won Tony Awards for Best Play), Lips Together, Teeth Apart, and The Lisbon Traviata. For his work as a librettist, McNally accepted Tonys for Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman and was nominated for The Full Monty. This spring, he wrote the Broadway play Deuce for two favorite leading ladies, Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. Last season, his play Some Men, partially set in a bathhouse like The Ritz, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Play.
For this production, starring Rosie Perez and Kevin Chamberlin, McNally re-teams with director and Roundabout associate artist Joe Mantello, who has been an inspired interpreter of many recent McNally efforts, including Love! Valour! Compassion!, Corpus Christi, A Man of No Importance, the 2002 Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and San Francisco Opera's premiere of Dead Man Walking. “I've reached that age where I worry about writing and I leave the directing totally to Joe,” says McNally. “He's such a master.” Front & Center caught up with the master playwright this summer.
FRONT & CENTER: When you and Joe Mantello did a reading of The Ritz with Rosie Perez and Kevin Chamberlain what did you discover?
TERRENCE McNALLY: We discovered that the play is still very, very funny. There's always that moment where you think, “Is the play going to be valid?” So I couldn't be more excited about this Roundabout revival. Audiences are going to have a great time. The Ritz is my one and only attempt so far at writing an out-and-out sex farce—a real farce. This was my tribute to Georges Feydeau and the great French masters of mistaken identity who were so adept at putting people in the wrong places at the wrong time. I've always loved the form of those plays; they take place in seedy hotels or, in this case, a seedy bathhouse. The first time I saw Angela Lansbury onstage was when she made her Broadway debut in a Feydeau play with Bert Lahr. In farce, the humor has got a totally different rhythm compared to a drawing room comedy or a comedy-of-manners, the verbal kinds of comedy I'm used to writing.
“The Ritz is my one and only attempt so far
at writing an out-and-out sex farce–a real farce.”
Several major scenes in your recent play Some Men also depicted gay men hooking up in the baths. Is it safe to go back and explore the gay bathhouse again?
Well, we'll find out. I think it's a great time. It feels very right to bring this play back now. That was the feeling in the room when we read it with Rosie and Kevin. It seemed joyful and liberating. When you're lucky to have a long career such as I have enjoyed, you see similarities in early plays or in themes that you come back to. Things that are taken very seriously in one play, you may look at more comically in another.
If it had been revived in the 1990s, AIDS would have cast a pall over the play...
Yes, I do think you need a bit of distance from that period. I don't think that at the height of the AIDS crisis it would have been wise to do The Ritz. Many plays do go through periods when they have to be seen, and there are times when they go away for a while. If you write about contemporary life, things that are actually happening, that's one of the risks you take.
When I saw your play Some Men last season, audiences were laughing wildly. Did audiences feel the same sense of liberation watching The Ritz on Broadway in 1975?
In Some Men I was trying to reflect back on how the gay experience has changed for men since I came to New York in the late 1950s and early '60s. To not have a scene in the bathhouse would have been wrong, but that scene in Some Men, although it has humor in it, also got serious. Two men actually make a real connection and become a long-term relationship couple for the rest of the play.
The bathhouse has a place in the history of the gay culture. You cannot write about the gay experience in New York in the second part of the 20th century and not have a scene in the bathhouse, it seems to me. These places were seminally important on so many levels. The big difference is that The Ritz was first done on Broadway. Audiences then were a little shocked in a way they won't be anymore. Some people went: “Oh, my God, these people are all gay, and this is a gay bathhouse!” Now I think everyone knows where the play takes place—there's no shock value. But the humor really comes through.
Bette Midler was dubbed “Bathhouse Betty” when she performed at the Continental accompanied on the piano by Barry Manilow. Did you see her at the baths?
Yes I did. Bette Midler was certainly part of the inspiration for Googie Gomez, Rosie's role. She set the precedent for a woman performing in a bathhouse. Other than that, there was no real link. I wrote Googie for Rita Moreno, hoping she'd want to do it. Fortunately, she did. Rita was so magnificent; she deserved her Tony® Award [for best featured actress in a play]. That character has a life of her own now, beyond Rita Moreno. People say, “That's a Googie, or you're being Googie Gomez.” She's like Mama Rose—more famous than the actress who played the part. In the play, she's the singer who thinks that this is the night where she's going to get discovered and that the legendary producer Joe Papp is going to make her a big star.
“The Ritz is about people trying to have sex and
getting frustrated. It's always the wrong time
or someone knocks on the door.”
How much nudity can we expect in The Ritz?
There was not a lot of nudity in the original production. There were men in towels. A sex farce is about the desire to have sex, not about having sex. There's a lack of morality in a French farce which I respond to. The characters' behaviors are based on their libidos, not their morals—I like that. People in the grip of Eros can do pretty outrageous and foolish things. The Ritz is about people trying to have sex and getting frustrated. It's always the wrong time or someone knocks on the door. When I think of a bathhouse, it's not about nudity; it is about people prowling around in towels, hoping to find Mr. Right.
Or Mr. “Right Now.” In reading the literature about the play, I've found that many gay critics are hung up about the flaming aspects of Chris, the gay queen, criticizing him as a stereotype. Can you comment on that?
When we did the play originally, he was one of the most popular characters. Some critics are quick to use the word “stereotype.” The way I perceive life, a lot of us are stereotypes, and we make the stereotype uniquely our own. Chris is the toughest person in the play. I don't want to meet Chris in a dark corner. He is very confrontational, and he was very much ahead of his time. He's not a sissy. He is his own guy. Being outrageous is his defense against the world. He was the original “we're here, we're queer, get used to it” kind of person.
To me, in many ways, Chris is the real hero of the play. Gaetano Proclo, the Italian guy who is fleeing the mob, makes a real journey by the end. He has different feelings about gay men than he did at the beginning. Proclo learns something from Chris—not from his idiot brother-in-law who's running around, wanting to shoot him. Proclo learns that these people have dignity, too, and they have strength, passion, and a real integrity about who they are. It's a very important role. Just to say he's a cliché or just another flaming queen is really not listening to what the man is saying.
Is The Ritz a commentary on free love?
This play is about being happy and enjoying life. It's a Greek bacchanal. Sex is a good and healthy part of life. It's such an anti-Puritanical play. I think there is still a prudish streak in American society that I hope this play will rattle up. Young people's expression of their sexuality is healthy. Older people who try to suppress sexuality are wrong. In that sense The Ritz is a pagan play. There's a great humanity in it, too. I find it very liberating that everyone gets along—the gays and the straights—at the end of the play. The only real villain is Carmine, and he gets his comeuppance. I think The Ritz is very political without pounding people over the head. To me it's a great source of pride that almost 40 years ago, people were laughing as they watched a sex farce about gay men on Broadway. Nobody noticed the political aspect of that—but I sure did.
Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre, is the author of the plays Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Pieces.
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