MAY 6, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
15
ENTERTAINMENT
Suburbanites voice homophobia in the gay sandbox
Lips Together, Teeth Apart Cleveland Play House
Reviewed by Barry Daniels Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, currently at the Cleveland Play House, features a particularly loathesome quartet of heterosexual characters who bash each other and exhibit a full range of homophobic feelings during the course of the evening. The play was first produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1991 and was moved to Broadway where it enjoyed a successful run. It has subsequently been produced in over fifty regional theaters and was the center of a controversy in Marietta, Georgia, when the Cobb County officials, without having seen it, overreacted to the AIDS and "homosexual" content and de-funded all future arts projects in the county.
The play is about two couples, John and Chloe Haddock and Sam and Sally Truman, who meet to spend the Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island Pines home Sally has recently inherited from her brother David, who died of AIDS. Sam and Chloe are brother and sister whose background is working class New Jersey. Sam owns a New Jersey construction company. John Haddock is more patrician in background and demeanor. He is the admissions director of a private school in Connecticut. He married Chloe because he had gotten her pregnant, and he's a womanizer who has recently succeeded in bedding Sally. Sally, like John, is a sensitive and better educated than her mate. She paints and has a vast knowledge of classical music. The characters are adept at the fine art of hurting each other, and it is possible to view the play as a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the
1990s. (Interestingly, McNally was Albee's lover in the early 1960s.)
It is possible to interpret Lips Together, Teeth Apart in different ways. I suspect it was designed to amuse a Manhattan audience, straight and gay, who would view it as a witty satire of suburban heterosexual marriage and provincial attitudes towards homosexuality. John and Sam are two versions of the strictly hetero male: in different ways they dominate and oppress their wives; their sexual bluster masks secret fears about their manhood; and they resolve their disagreement in a fist-fight. Chloe and Sally are frustrated housewives. Chloe is vulgar and manic, while Sally is refined and skittish. In this reading of the play, gay is good. The gay men in neighboring houses are friendly and welcoming to the couples. The structural climax of the play is a fireworks display which is preceded by Sam's description of two men making love in the bushes near the house. After describing their orgasms, he notes, "They still don't move. They lie in each other's arms in the sand, in the poison ivy, under a full July moon, the sound of the Atlantic Ocean and Ella Fitzgerald wondering 'How High the Moon.' And now I hear it. I hear 'I love you.' ." This "I love you" located in the sharing of pleasure stands against the resigned and masochistic "I love yous" of the heterosexual couples which bring the play to a conclusion.
McNally has insisted that he prefers to be thought of as a "gay man who writes plays" than as a "gay playwright.” Although my gay friendly, New York reading of the play is viable, McNally clearly intended it to be possible for a straight audience to read the play differently and sympathize with the
"quiet desperation" of the two couple's unhappy lives. Each character is given a "hook": John has terminal cancer; Sally cannot carry a pregnancy to term; Sam fears having children as he is sure they won't love him; and Chloe has been demeaned to the point of having no sense of self-worth. Straight audiences can wallow in the bathos of all this and can comfortably share the homophobia that is constantly voiced throughout the play. Although I don't think McNally intended the homophobia to be accepted, it is an inherent danger in his middle-of-the-road attitude.
McNally has been at the top of his form as a writer in his recent work. In Lips Together, Teeth Apart his language is polished, his wit is sharp and his structure is subtle and musical. None of this is captured in Scott Kanoff's inept staging of the play at the Play House. Although we can laugh at a witty line, the evening is shapeless and
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tedious. The acting is uneven. Kay Walbye and Vasili Bogazianos, as Sally and Sam, are clearly accomplished performers, but they waver in their commitment to the characters. Patty Dworkin's Chloe is a cartoonish overstatement, while Richard Bekin's John is bland and monotonous.
In Cleveland, which is essentially a suburban city, Lips Together, Teeth Apart cannot really succeed as the virulent satire of suburban heterosexuality that I would want to make of it. The Play House production goes for the middle-of-the-road approach which problematizes the homophobic content of the play. Most gay people I spoke with after the performance were, like me, both offended and bored. The rainbow wind streamers on the set-a bit tacky for Fire Island Pines—and the Living Proof exhibition in the lobby do not make up for an unwillingness to confront the dangerous ambiguity of McNally's work.
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