Austin Festival to Honor Terrence McNally With Five New Play Readings in Late January

A weekend festival celebrating the late playwright Terrence McNally is set to bring five new play readings to Austin from January 29 to 31, organized by the Terrence McNally Foundation in association with Rattlestick Theater.

McNally, who grew up in Texas and died in 2020 at age 81, won five Tony Awards and shaped American theatre for six decades. His credits include Master Class, Frankie & Johnny in the Claire de Lune, and Love! Valour! Compassion! The festival is meant to extend his record of backing bold new voices, with readings directed and performed by leading talent from Austin and elsewhere in the country.

The weekend also includes an academic symposium at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center, which holds McNally's archived papers. The source describes him there as "the bard of American theater."

The festival opens on January 29 at 3 p.m. with Girl Time by Eliza Frakes, a real-time play that shifts from comedy to horror to drama as it explores class, femininity and privilege. Its central character, Jocelyn, has a bad night and turns to a babysitter with a drinking problem. Frakes is an MFA candidate at UT Austin through the Michener Center for Writers. At 7 p.m. that evening, Kate Fodor's The Seahorse follows a married couple and a library worker whose lives are complicated by mascot costumes. Fodor was named one of "Eight to Watch" in theater by The New York Times and has written for four seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Rattlestick Artistic Director Will Davis, an alumnus of UT, returns to direct.

On January 30 at 3 p.m., Zack Fine of the UT School of Theater & Dance faculty and Bradley Michalakis present their stage adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which they also direct. The festival materials say the satire has never been successfully adapted for the stage until now. That evening at 8 p.m., the Rude Mechs perform McNally's Corpus Christi at Crash Box Theatre. First staged in 1998, the play recasts the New Testament through Joshua, a gay Christ figure raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the early 1950s. It is the only McNally play set in Texas.

The final day begins at 10:30 a.m. on January 31 with You Can Tell a Tree by Its Fruit by comfort ifeoma katchy, a Houston native and recent Yale MFA graduate. Set in Reconstruction-era Texas, it follows Louis Carter Sr., a Black shoemaker who returns home after an unjust imprisonment and invites his Irish immigrant cellmate and family to be the public face of his business, Carter's Shoe Emporium. The drama examines who gets to rise and what is sacrificed in pursuit of the American Dream.

The festival closes at 2 p.m. with The Daisies by Tony Meneses, a UT Austin alumnus returning to campus to debut the work. Set in the late 1990s, it centers on DJ Santi, who resists corporate buyouts as local station 107.9 The Abyss prepares to go off the air at midnight by playing one song on repeat while colleagues and callers rally around him.