McNally's drive to dramatize the ways by which people are able eventually to accept difference explains the importance of India in his personal mythology, Hinduism representing the acceptance of all that is human, the willingness to enjoy the bittersweet smell of a baby's soiled diapers and to embrace a leper.

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Thus, for McNally, the most important thing that the arts--particularly theater and opera--can do is to break down the walls that divide people and widen the shared human breathing space. "The world can and will go on without us," Maria Callas acknowledges at the conclusion of her master class, "but I have to think that we have made this world a better place. That we have left it richer, wiser than had we not chosen the way of art."

McNally's oeuvre is a metacommentary upon the power of theater to confront prejudice, break down resistance, and effect reconciliation. Frankie and Johnny's relationship is sealed by two pieces of music that they hear on the radio. In Lisbon Traviata, Stephen and Mendy live for and through the operas of Maria Callas (much as Buzz lives for and through musical comedy in Love), and Stephen's parting with Mike is played variously as Don Jose's stabbing of Carmen or as Violetta's sacrifice for Alfredo. The puppet play that Katherine witnesses in India holds up her relationship with her gay son for her examination.

And, although supposedly addressing her master class of students at Julliard, the actress playing Callas speaks directly to McNally's audience. Her comments on how an artist lives and performs are also McNally's encouragement to the audience to allow art to enlarge their lives. Art crystallizes the "defining moment" that characters in all of his plays must experience if they are to find their way to acceptance and redemption. McNally's is, finally, a tragicomic theater of "reconciliation, renewal and re-birth" in which, as he puts it in Ganesh, opposites are able to exist peacefully side by side and "a tiny leap [can be made] across the void between two people."

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