Terrence McNally, a prolific, much-honored playwright who rose to the forefront of American theater with a humane and lyrical style in works such as “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class,” died March 24 at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. He was 81.

The cause was complications from the coronavirus, said press agent Matt Polk, adding that Mr. McNally had chronic inflammatory lung disease.

With his supple, approachable plays, Mr. McNally emerged as a pivotal American dramatist, particularly as art and politics collided during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.

His body of work comprised dozens of plays, nearly a dozen musicals and several operas. His modes ranged from anxious farces and social critiques in the 1960s and 1970s, when the gay-bathhouse romp “The Ritz” (1975) was his biggest hit, to the warmhearted “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1994), which illustrated the lives of eight gay men vacationing at a lake house. His “Corpus Christi,” which depicted a Jesus-like figure and his disciples as gay, ignited a firestorm in 1998.

After decades of qualified successes and setbacks, Mr. McNally had a run of Tony triumphs in the 1990s that made him a commercial force. He won the award for best book of a musical with “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), adapted respectively from novels by Manuel Puig and E.L. Doctorow. He won the Tony prize for best play with “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class” (1995), a comic drama about the imperious opera star Maria Callas giving lessons on art and life. Read more via Washington Post