You can’t contract HIV from swimming in the same pool as someone who has been diagnosed with AIDS. Sure, that’s common knowledge now, but in the late 1980s when Mike Sisco, an openly gay man known to be HIV-positive, made national headlines after attempting to take a dip in his community pool in West Virginia, the entire country panicked, proselytized and prayed.
So little was known about this mysterious “gay disease” then that it’s easy to imagine the coy homophobia and rampant paranoia laced throughout Terrence McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.” It’s the Fourth of July on Fire Island — Long Island’s upscale answer to the bawdy revelry of Key West, Fla. — and Sally has inherited her brother’s immaculate beach house after his AIDS-related death. She and husband Sam invite Sam’s sister and her husband away for a peaceful and relaxing holiday, but naturally, everyone has packed their own baggage. No one will go in the pool, and with so many secrets swirling among the four of them, it’s a volatile Independence Day that produces fireworks of a more emotional variety.
McNally’s 1991 drama touches on the cultural politics of sexuality, race and gender — all familiar motifs from the playwright who penned “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” But here McNally has crafted a pragmatic tale that is just as much about the subtext of relationships as it is about confronting our own inevitable immortality.
“No one wants to listen to who we really are,” waxes one of McNally’s hard-drawn characters, and in the hands of the Bay Theatre Company, it appears that the actors have a hard enough time just listening to each other. It isn’t necessarily because McNally’s script relies on lots of exposition told solely through soliloquy, or that the quibbling quartet appear fractured from the very opening of the play. It’s that someone forgot to mention to the cast that this is McNally, not Shakespeare, and his acerbic humor relies heavily on naturalism.
Though a tad bit overarticulated, McNally’s wit isn’t wasted on Gillian Drake’s subtly stifling production. Produced out of their tiny matchbox space in downtown Annapolis, Drake has somehow managed to re-create a gorgeous sundeck set with elegant, detailed design work from Ken Sheats. And whether it’s Colleen Delany’s superannoying Chloe or Britton Herring’s vitriolic John spewing forth stereotype and sentiments of superiority, the expert sound design by Chris Baine provides clear audio and plausible background chatter.
The evening still packs an emotional punch, with fleeting moments of profundity hidden under its comic glaze. But the largest problem with “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” is that McNally’s script, now aged nearly two decades, appears only slightly dated. If only the subject material seemed old, foreign, quaint — but its misinformed beliefs and opinions and fears are still as unfortunately relevant today as they were when McNally first expressed them in such searing fiction.
