“Allow, Accept, Be”: Terrence McNally’s Engagement with Hindu Spirituality in A Perfect Ganesh

“Indian identity stresses that surrender to greater powers is better than individual effort and that a person becomes his true self as he enters into the living stream, naturally and un-self-consciously, of the community life and its traditions,” observes Jeffrey Paine in his study of how encounters with Indian culture transformed the modern West.¹ Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh (1993) climaxes as two upper-middle-class American women on holiday in India are piloted down the Ganges to Varanasi, Hinduism’s sacred city of the dead. Their fragile skiff bumps against the remains of various animals and, more disconcertingly, human corpses, splashing Margaret and Katharine with water that the former fears will contaminate them, but which actually signifies a purging of their taint from “individual effort” and inconsolable grief, freeing them in the next scene to enter into the earthly paradise of the Taj Mahal. Their encounter with India forces the two Americans to grow to respect both the fullness of the life cycle (which includes death as well as life) and the rich complexity of humanity (which includes dark skin as well as light, and homosexuals as well as heterosexuals). As Margaret and Katharine learn through their often disconcerting but, finally, transcendent journey across India, “We all have a place here. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Allow. Accept. Be.”²

A Perfect Ganesh is the final entry in an informal triptych of plays in which McNally addresses both the fear of difference that renders life-sustaining intimacy impossible and, more specifically (albeit less directly), the inhumanity manifested in 1980s and early 1990s America toward victims of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), an ambivalently named heterosexual couple, each of whom has been damaged by a failed past relationship, struggles to connect in the course of a sexually passionate and emotionally complex night-long encounter. When Johnny reassuringly sucks the blood flowing from Frankie’s cut finger—a horrifying act at a time when Americans had only recently become aware of how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids—a predominantly heterosexual audience, viewing the development of a heterosexual romance, was forced to confront the fear of infection that builds walls between people who, paradoxically, are in the more desperate need of comfort for all their self-imposed, defensive isolation. Similarly, in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), two married heterosexual couples spend the Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island house that one of the women has inherited from a gay brother who recently died of an AIDS-related illness. Their fear of using his swimming pool lest they catch the virus which killed him, unspoken for most of the play, bespeaks a paranoia about sexual difference that infects even the most intimate of relationships. In addition to providing the only homosexual characters actually to appear onstage in the triptych, A Perfect Ganesh offers a vision of an alternative socioreligious system in which the emotionally wounded and physically damaged are ministered to by a god who, unbeknownst to them, moves in their midst to help them overcome the obstacles to intimacy that they themselves have created. The play, in short, suggests how sexual and racial differences must be accepted as a part of life if one is to live fully and religiously.

McNally makes this statement through the figure of Ganesh, a god who, himself part human and part animal (an elephant-headed man riding atop a mouse or rat), symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites and who, in Hinduism, is both the creator and the remover of obstacles. The popularity of Ganesh across India offers McNally the means of dramatizing an acceptance and, even, celebration of difference that makes for a more religiously satisfying existence. In the face of an American Judeo-Christianity that, historically, has been ambivalent about and, at times, deeply intolerant of sexual difference, McNally turns to Hinduism for an alternative religious model of how people can overcome the related obstacles of...