Terrence McNally, the Tony Award-winning playwright who taught and babysat John Steinbeck’s boys when they were hard-to-manage teenagers, has died in Sarasota, Florida from complications of the COVID-19 virus which shuttered Broadway and much of the world’s business after being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. A survivor of lung cancer, McNally, 81, was a 20-something graduate student at Columbia University when Steinbeck family friend Edward Albee recommended him as a tutor and companion for Steinbeck’s sons Thom and John IV during an extended tour of Europe taken by the Steinbeck family 60 years ago. As noted in a March 24, 2020 profile of the playwright published in The Guardian, “McNally’s long career began in 1961 when John Steinbeck asked him to work together on a number of projects, including a musical version of East of Eden” which, like other projects following the failure of the 1955 musical Pipe Dream, never materialized.
Composite image of Terrence McNally courtesy New York Post.
About Administrative Team