Sensitive artist Sally is married to blue-collar Sam. Sam's amateur-actress sister Chloe is married to preppy academic John. John and Sally are sleeping together and think their spouses don't know. The two couples are spending their Fourth of July weekend together at the beach house that Sally inherited from her now-deceased brother. Oh, and by the way, the beach is on Fire Island, and the late owner of the vacation home died of AIDS.
Terrence McNally's title, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, is represented in the text as a dental exercise for reducing bruxism, but it could also describe the act of starting to say something, then hesitating before doing so. (Try it yourself and see.)
Early in the play, John declares that they will all "drink Stoli and get Chekhovian"—a hint that soon secrets will be revealed, crimes confessed, fears articulated and crises of conscience wrestled into submission. We will learn who is dying of cancer, who conceals a child's terror of abandonment behind a bluff exterior, who is the first to get friendly with the gay neighbors, who eavesdrops—not without a measure of fascination—on clandestine male trysts in the shrubbery, who defies the imagined contagion lurking in the swimming pool, and who regrets not sounding the alarm when a skinny-dipper doesn't return to shore.
If Mart Crowley's Boys in the Band depicted gay men in 1968 seeking sanctuary in a hostile world, McNally makes a case for hets in 1990 similarly chafing under awareness of their mortality, their struggle exacerbated by its spiritual isolation. We may never see the other residents of the resort colony, but the music emanating from the adjacent patio-decks—opera on one side and show tunes on the other—bespeak a companionship, community and solidarity absent from the superficial intimacy of the legally wedded Hubs/Hons. Only at the end of a long day's quasi-Eugene O'Neill journey into night are the lonely outsiders able to share in the holiday festivities, waving rainbow flags in the comforting fireworks' glow.
McNally's contemplative soliloquy-laden script is ill-served by the foreshortened stage picture arising from the Athenaeum's cramped third-floor studio, but the quartet of actors assembled by director Ted Hoerl are adept at maneuvering in small spaces and deliver uniformly full-bodied performances with never a moment's reduction in confidence or stamina. The incorporation of two intermissions likewise ensures audiences' unfatigued attention for this microcosmic portrait of an era not as long ago as we would like to think.
