This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Terrence McNally, the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright whose outpouring of work for the theater dramatized and domesticated gay life across five decades, died on Tuesday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 81.

The cause was complications of the coronavirus, according to his husband, Tom Kirdahy. Mr. McNally had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and had overcome lung cancer. He died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.