In the play, Katharine (the imperious, implacable Tyne Daly) pays a surprise visit to Cal ( Frederick Weller.) He’s the former lover of her son Andre, who died of AIDS. In the past 50 years, McNally has had 20 shows on Broadway and won four Tony Awards: for best plays of 1995, *Love! Valour! Compassion!*and of 1996, Master Class, and for two musical books, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. Terrence McNally was among the first to document the wild varieties of gay-life experience in plays like Lips Together, Teeth Apart, one of several plays he wrote about gay men and the cataclysmic history of AIDS. It represents a milestone, too, she thinks. (In it, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional.) Everybody wants to meet her. I grab a drink, and producer Loraine Alterman Boyle introduces me to probably the most impressive person there, 84-year-old Edith Windsor, who won a landmark case for gay marriage. All four floors have been taken over for the party. Gay Talese, Diane von Furstenberg, Zoe Caldwell, and Bill Irwin are upstairs. There’s opera singer _Marilyn Horne, Elaine May, Stanley Donen, Doris Roberts._There’s Peggy Siegal, Chita Rivera, and Jack O’Brien. I’m in Sardi’s being pushed around and around that famous great room by a noisy surging crowd of 500 people. It’s the opening-night party for Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons.
