‘Lifetime achievement, not a moment too soon.’ Terrence McNally at the Tony Awards: WATCH

The Chicago Tribune says it was the most important speech at the Tonys:

Clearly the ever-impish and self-aware McNally was acknowledging his own mortality. And in America, at this moment, nothing seems to make an awards show crowd less comfortable. It’s hard to come out in your fancy clothes and roar for youth and change, to take down the old guard, when the old guard is not necessarily looking so good.

McNally had taken a while to walk out on stage, leaving the award’s presenter, Karen Olivo, to nervously stare at her monitor. And he came out with attached breathing apparatus, tubes dangling, as if with a certain intentionality. In play after play, McNally wrote about gay Americans confronting early deaths that could have been avoided, had people outside the theater industry given more of a darn. His own appearance put that back in mind. Broadway artists love to complain about the grip of the patriarchy. But an inconvenient truth is that the patriarchy — if you mean straight, white, WASP-ish men — never gave two shakes about the theater. This industry was never banking, or even Hollywood.

The speech was little more than three minutes. Yet this was the most beautiful recounting of one of this nation’s most distinguished artistic careers.

“Theater changes hearts,” he said, struggling to fully breathe his way through his words. “That secret place where we all truly live.”

McNally found time to speak of early failure and how John Steinbeck told him to get back on his horse: “If you ain’t been throwed, you ain’t rode.” He recalled how much the artists of a previous generation had meant to him as a small boy. He revealed that his father, after watching “Death of a Salesman” and seeing a traumatic vision of what happens to so many of us later in an American life in an American business, had quit his job and struck out on his own.

READ THE REST OF The Chicago Tribune STORY HERE.

“The world needs artists more than ever,” McNally said, “to remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are.”

And watch the speech below.