Guest Editor's Notes on The Terrence McNally Issue
Photo of Lynn Ahrens and Gretchen Cryer
Lynn Ahrens and Gretchen Cryer

Guest-editing an issue of The Dramatist devoted to Terrence McNally has been a joyful and daunting task. He was so prolific, so profound, and so beloved that this issue could have been twice its size. We have tried to capture the essence of Terrence: his passion, his wit, his wisdom, and his devotion to the theatre and to other writers and theater artists. As we poured over his plays, his essays and the tsunami of tributes we received from those whose lives he touched, we were overwhelmed at the sheer volume of his life! How did one person do so much in a lifetime?

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Lynn Ahrens 
Lynn Ahrens 

won Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Score of Broadway’s Ragtime. She was nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes for the score of Twentieth Century Fox’s animated feature Anastasia, which she also adapted for Broadway. Her many additional Broadway and off-Broadway credits include Once On This Island (2018 Tony Award for Best Musical Revival); Seussical; Madison Square Garden’s A Christmas CarolMy Favorite Year, Rocky, A Man of No Importance, and more. She’s an Emmy winner and four-time Grammy nominee., co-founder of the DGF Fellows program and a Lifetime Member of the Dramatists Guild Council. In 2015, she and long-time collaborator Stephen Flaherty were inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
www.ahrensandflaherty.com

Gretchen Cryer 
Gretchen Cryer 

is best known for writing and starring in I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road. She has written eight other musicals with composer Nancy Ford which have won the Obie, the Outer Circle Critics Award, and the Drama Desk Award. Gretchen is also a recipient of the Ed Kleban Award. She was inducted into the Off-Broadway Hall of Fame in 2020 as a Legend of Off-Broadway, is President Emeritus of the Dramatists Guild Foundation, and serves on the Dramatists Guild Council.