Theater Review—

McNally At Westport: A Quartet Of Human Vulnerability

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Terrence McNally’s Lips Together Teeth Apart, is twenty years old now, and in that time medical advances and more enlightened public attitudes have lessened the impact of the specter of AIDS. To be HIV positive is no longer an automatic death sentence; the obituary pages of the newspapers are no longer studded on a daily basis with the names of young men dying “after a long illness,” and the gay community is no longer haunted by continual loss.

But it is this atmosphere of fear and tension that is the subtext of McNally’s play. Set in one of Fire Island’s gay enclaves, the story focuses on the dynamics of two heterosexual couples, spending the Fourth of July Weekend in an oceanfront beach house that one of the women, Sally Truman, inherited from her brother, who died of the disease.

Sally and her husband Sam have invited Sam’s sister, Chloe Haddock, and her husband, John, to join them, but it is not a comfortable fit. Each of the four is so troubled by private demons and personal angst that they are totally insensitive to each other’s feelings and needs, incapable of listening, and unwittingly offensive.

They move, at times, in mechanical poses, voicing their individual secret anguish, before lapsing into irritating behavior. (You really don’t want to be trapped in a vacation house with these folks.)

In addition to the interplay with one another, there is a constant awareness of their gay neighbors, the young men who occupy the houses on either side. We don’t see them, but their presence is made known through their music as they party through the weekend: a mix of show tunes and mournful opera.

There is also a lone swimmer, seen only by Sally, who leaves his robe on the beach and heads too far out in the water until he disappears. In their self-conscious display of tolerance, the quartet struggles to cope with their fears about staying in a house possibly contaminated by the disease.

In his play Love, Valour, Compassion, McNally explored the emotions of those young men.

Lips Together Teeth Apart, which just wrapped a run at Westport Country Playhouse, offers a portrait of heterosexual couples suffering from the same kind of alienation and fear, albeit from different (but similar) causes: cancer, betrayal, a sense of personal inadequacy. We are all human, and vulnerable.

Maggie Lacey and John Ellison Conlee as the Trumans, and Jenn Gambatese and Chris Henry Coffey as the Haddocks, show their Law and Order acting credentials well, and Andrew Jackness’ scenic design and John Gromada’s sound design make you feel like you are really there.