If a play isn’t worth dying for, maybe it isn’t worth writing.
—Terrence McNally

We can excuse McNally his fervor. He is, in many respects, an unlikely convert to the Salman Rushdie club. Is The Ritz, a farce about a garbage man on the lam who takes refuge in a steam bath, worth dying for? Is Next, a comedy about a middle-aged movie theater manager suddenly ordered to take an army physical, worth dying for? Is The Rink, a Liza Minnelli/Chita Rivera vehicle about a run-down roller rink, worth dying for? Liza and Chita are always to die for, darling, but one assumes McNally meant his cry of defiance rather more literally. Still, over the years he evidently thought all three worth writing.

By the time Corpus Christi actually opened, the defense had somehow managed to reverse itself: if a play isn’t worth writing, surely it isn’t worth dying for. In the spring, the Manhattan Theatre Club had announced a new McNally work about a “gay Jesus-like figure.” The Catholic League and other religious groups protested, the theater received a couple of death threats, and a few nervous corporate sponsors decided it might be wise to withdraw. At which point, the MTC cancelled the production. Now they were faced with protests from far more powerful figures, ones who knew how to get op-ed pieces on artistic freedom into the respectable newspapers—actors, directors, playwrights, Larry Kramer, Athol Fugard, Tony Kushner… . So the MTC