[18] McNally later said: "When I saw On the Town, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: 'That's where I want to live.'

[22] He joined the Boar's Head Society[23] and wrote Columbia's annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L. Kleban and directed by Michael P. Kahn.

[25] After graduation, McNally moved to Mexico to focus on his writing, completing a one-act play which he submitted to the Actors Studio in New York City for production.

His earliest full-length play, This Side of the Door, deals with a sensitive boy's battle of wills with his overbearing father and was produced in an Actors Studio Workshop in 1962, featuring a young Estelle Parsons.

[12] Starting a career that covered both off-Broadway and Broadway, his plays cried out against Vietnam, satirized stale family dynamics, mocked sexual mores and became a part of the social protest movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

[26] In 1964, his next play And Things That Go Bump in the Night put homosexuality squarely on stage which brought him the ire of New York City's conservative theatre critics.

The play explores the psycho-social dynamic of anxiety that leads one to preemptively and defensively accuse others of creating problems that in actuality result from one's own insecurity.

[28] Next (1968), which brought him his greatest early acclaim and was directed by Elaine May and starred James Coco, follows a married, middle-aged, businessman who has been mistakenly drafted into the armed forces.

These and his other early plays, including Tour (1967), Witness (1968), and Bringing It All Back Home (1970), and Whiskey (1973), form a dark satire on American moral complacency.

Bad Habits, which satirizes American reliance upon psychotherapy, premiered at the John Drew Theatre in East Hampton, New York, in 1971 starring Linda Lavin.

Rewritten and retitled It's Only a Play, it premiered in off-Broadway in 1985 at Manhattan Theatre Club directed by John Tillinger and starring Christine Baranski, Joanna Gleason, and James Coco.

[12] McNally only became truly successful with works such as the off-Broadway production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and its screen adaptation with stars Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In 1990, McNally won an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Miniseries or Special for Andre's Mother, a drama about a woman coping with her son's death from AIDS.

It was written for Christine Baranski, Anthony Heald, Swoosie Kurtz (taking the place of Kathy Bates), and frequent McNally collaborator Nathan Lane, who had also starred in The Lisbon Traviata.

[30][31] With Kiss of the Spider Woman (based on the novel by Manuel Puig) in 1992, McNally returned to the musical stage, collaborating with Kander and Ebb on a script which explores the complex relationship between two men jailed together in a Latin American prison.

He collaborated with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens on Ragtime in 1997, a musical adaptation of the E. L. Doctorow novel, which tells the story of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a black musician who demands retribution when his Model T is destroyed by a mob of white troublemakers.

"[36] In 2000, McNally partnered with composer and lyricist David Yazbek to write the musical The Full Monty, which was directed by Jack O'Brien and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell.

The opening night cast included Patrick Wilson, Andre De Shields, Jason Danieley, Kathleen Freeman, Emily Skinner, and Annie Golden.

Adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1956 satire, The Visit is the story of a widow who has amassed enormous sums of wealth and returns to her hometown to seek revenge on the villagers who scorned her in her youth.

[51] Continuing his work on librettos, McNally partnered with his collaborators on Ragtime, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, to write the musical A Man of No Importance which premiered at Lincoln Center in 2002 and was directed by Joe Mantello.

[52] He also wrote the libretto for Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, in 2005, another collaboration with Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, which began at The Old Globe and subsequently transferred to Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

[56] And Away We Go premiered Off-Broadway at the Pearl Theatre in November 2013, with direction by Jack Cummings III and featured Donna Lynne Champlin, Sean McNall and Dominic Cuskern.

[57] The play takes place over several millennia covering the most pivotal moments in dramatic history entwined with a modern-day story of a struggling theatre company.

"[59] Mothers and Sons starring Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, where Master Class had its premiere, on March 24, 2014 (February 23, 2014, in previews).

[67] In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named him one of the Pride50 "trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people".

[69][70] In his early years in New York City, McNally's interest in theatre brought him to a party where, departing, he shared a cab with Edward Albee, who had recently written The Zoo Story and The Sandbox.

In celebration of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states, they renewed their vows at New York City Hall with Mayor Bill de Blasio, Kirdahy's college roommate,[74] officiating on June 26, 2015.

[13] For McNally, the most important function of theatre was to create community and bridge rifts opened between people by differences in religion, race, gender, and particularly sexual orientation.

The archive includes all of his major works for stage, screen, and television, as well as correspondence, posters, production photographs, programs, reviews, awards, speeches, and recordings.

[82][83] The film features new interviews with McNally in addition to conversations with his friends and collaborators, including F. Murray Abraham, Christine Baranski, Tyne Daly, Edie Falco, John Kander, Nathan Lane, Angela Lansbury, Marin Mazzie, Audra McDonald, Rita Moreno, Billy Porter, Chita Rivera, Doris Roberts, John Slattery and Patrick Wilson, plus the voices of Dan Bucatinsky, Bryan Cranston and Meryl Streep.