Terrence McNally established himself as a playwright with a light comic gift in the mid 1960s and has matured into one of the most versatile and prolific playwrights in the American theater. Some critics have described him as the American Ben Jonson, a British writer whose dark view of the contemporary human situation is tempered by a strong vein of humor and satire. McNally's characters in his earliest plays find themselves in a splintered and unfriendly world; the subjects of these works range from the disillusionments of the Vietnam era to the self-deluding popular culture of the late twentieth century. McNally has exhibited an increasingly compassionate and lyrical touch in his plays since the mid 1980s and a life-affirming viewpoint, remarkable for a gay dramatist writing in the midst of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) pandemic. New York Times critic David Richards, in his piece "A Working Playwright...