Curtain

Daniel McGrath 1964-2025

Yesterday, Danny McGrath died. He was a year ahead of me in college and directed plays I acted in. He was a member of the Harvard Lampoon and went on after college to write for nationally famous comedy shows.

In college, Danny directed productions that were mordantly funny, and also personally made fun of the New Yorker for being mordantly funny and of anyone who might say mordantly funny or anyone who thought the world began and ended with New Yorkers. He was, however, a quintessential New Yorker. He took me to my first White Castle. He walked in NYC with the grace of a big cat in its home savanna. If parkour were making the city a play space while talking a mile a minute with detours for literary references, political satire, and both genuine laughter and sadness at the ills of the world, he would have been the champion. He lived in cultural capitals, New York and LA, but found it absurd, conceptually, that those capitals ignore the rest of the country.

Our closest integration of the genius of Danny was the production of As I Lay Dying, in the basement theater of our dorm, where Danny wrung a play, with action, characters, and joy out of Faulkner’s -my-mother-is-a-fish - novel. Our crew bonded under Danny’s feral and absolutely kind leadership. His sparkling eyes peered from behind a hawkish nose with a ready laugh. Our crew had hopes of being a troupe. Most of them graduated that year and I moved out of the dorms after they left. Now, one is a national ethics expert, a couple of us are academics, one writes histories of the NYPD, one runs the liberal media in Latvia. Our producer, (because in true Danny style, we needed a production crew), died some twenty years ago. She called the break up of our cast, due to graduation and making a life post college “career objections” rather than directions.

Danny also directed our student production of Richard’s Cork Leg, Brendan Behan’s unfinished last play, on the main stage at American Repertory Theater. Richard’s Cork Leg is often described as impossible. Catnip to Danny. Layers of satire and spoof filled the stage with outrageous characters, songs, bits, gags, and a completely flat plot. Danny made us all believe in the show. I played an ingenue on a tombstone in the graveyard set. At the cast party I drunkenly tried to swig from a beer bottle that someone had put out a cigarette in and Danny said “don’t do that.” I had felt in my stupor somehow obligated. He couldn’t stand seeing me be mean to myself.

After college, Danny and I talked a few times, visited for a long beach walk in California where I lived and connected at odd moments in LA or San Francisco with friends. We had all hoped that somehow we would be the crew that found a house in rural somewhere and put together a family-of-choice theater troupe to laugh and satirize our way to a better world. I think Danny believed it. Even thirty years out from graduation when I talked to him on the phone from a meadow in Vermont, he was wondering if we could quit the trajectories life had handed us and make the dream happen. “I’ve been thinking about quitting and making theater” he said in my ear, as I stood, married, pregnant with my son, a three year old daughter in my sight, at my husband’s thirtieth college reunion. I think I answered, “I’m in, Danny. We should do it.” But really, I was getting tenure and teaching landscape architecture and art in New Mexico.

So, although I said good-bye to that dream too many years ago, I am still saying good-bye to Danny. Good-byes are terribly sad.

Yesterday, I had a talk to give at Pratt Institute in a new landscape architecture program where my dear friend from graduate school is chair. I hoped on this trip through New York City to visit Danny in hospice and say good-bye in person. I wanted to say I’m sorry the dreams changed. I wanted to say thank you for being alive and inspiring and giving me joy in college, for making space for the impish, the gleeful, the critical, and the achingly sad. I wasn’t sure how to say all that at a bedside in a Brooklyn hospital, but I thought maybe I could try. I was at least in the same borough. I found out an hour before I was due to talk at Pratt that Danny had died.

Curtain.

So, instead of being able to be at a bedside, I made the best performance I could out of a talk about my work on sentient landscapes and connecting with non-humans. I spoke to a nice room full of people, projecting my voice to my college student daughter in the back of the room. In my mind, I thanked Danny for animating me to inspire students to think about the world as a place full of life, and to help me not to be afraid to include some theatrical tricks of voice and pause in talking about the work I did. I included the gleeful and the achingly sad.

I hope Danny is founding that close knit theater community in the sky.