The Lisbon Traviata, is a powerfully moving tragicomedy about a crumbling homosexual marriage. And in Frankie and Johhnie in the Claire de Lune, a man and a woman, not young, not old, no great beauties, either one, come together in a fresh and witty display of emotional fireworks. McNally himself describes the final piece, the bitingly honest and uproariously funny It's Only a Play, as his attempt to describe what it was like to work in Broadway in the 1980s.