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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, Terrence McNally moved to New York City to attend college in 1956, and has stayed on ever since. McNally majored in English as an undergraduate at Columbia University, earning membership in Phi Beta Kappa at the time of his graduation in 1960. He achieved his first playwriting success in college as the author of the annual senior varsity show--following in the footsteps of his Columbia predecessor, musical-comedy genius Oscar Hammerstein.
After leaving college, McNally travelled to Mexico, where he completed the script for a one-act play which he submitted for production to the Actors Studio in New York-- the most prestigious professional actor-training institution in the city. Although impressed by McNally's writing talent, the Studio's play reader saw in the script clear evidence that the young author lacked practical knowledge of the theater. She therefore invited McNally to serve as stage manager for the Studio, a position in which he was to meet the most important members of the theater profession in New York while learning the nuts and bolts of writing for the stage. McNally's earliest works exhibit the stylistic mannerisms of absurdist theater, the political anger of the Vietnam-war era, and the obscene frankness of the sexual revolution. In 1964 the grotesque farce And Things That Go Bump in the Night caused scandal at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota and titillation in New York with its deranged portrait of an allegedly "typical" American family. Within four years McNally had become one of the most important voices of the off-Broadway theater movement as the 1968-69 season saw seven of his one-act plays in production in and around New York. These included Sweet Eros, Bringing it All Back Home, and Noon. By 1971, however, McNally was changing his focus and his style. The political anger and absurdist mannerisms were fading, and the hard-edged eroticism was modulating into a humorous, sometimes farcical, treatment of the joy and pain of love. These new emphases begin to be visible in Bad Habits (1974) and The Ritz (1975), and are fully developed in The Lisbon Traviata (1985), a study of love and loss that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. Among McNally's most recent works are Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), the Broadway version of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1990), and Love! Valour! Compassion!, first produced Off-Broadway in 1994 and scheduled to open on Broadway later this year. Both The Ritz and Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune have been adapted for the screen. Lips Together, Teeth Apart was first produced in New York in 1991. |
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THE SETTING.
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The action takes place during a Fourth of July weekend at a luxurious beach house on Fire Island, an oceanside resort about twenty miles east of New York City, off the southern coast of Long Island. Fire Island is well- known to New Yorkers as a community with a large homosexual population.
The beach house originally belonged to David, the brother of Sally, who is one of the four characters in the play. David, a homosexual, has died of AIDS and left the house to his sister. She and her husband, Sam, have invited Chloe, Sam's sister, and her husband, John, to be their guests for this holiday weekend--the first time any of them has visited the house since David's death. They are virtually the only heterosexuals in the vicinity. Thus, ironically, the conventional people are the outsiders in this world. |
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THE PLOT.
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The action in Lips Together, Teeth Apart does not take the traditional linear form of a story. Instead, events are organized according to the principal of "theme and variations." McNally is interested in exploring both the fragility and endurance of love in the face of death. We see this tension expressed in various ways throughout the play.
Sally and Sam love one another, as do Chloe and John. Yet both couples face problems that threaten to disrupt their marriages. As the play progresses from its opening scenes at breakfast to its closing moments at the end of a long evening, the characters keep returning to these problems, revealing ever more about their emotional lives. The first problem we encounter is unfaithfulness. Sally and John have had a brief affair, a fact known to both their spouses. As the day goes on, the tensions generated by this situation grow more acute, culminating in a physical confrontation between Sam and John. We also discover that John has been diagnosed with cancer six weeks earlier, and that his chances for long-term survival are slight. We understand, therefore, that Chloe's compulsive chattering, singing, performing, fixing of drinks, serving of meals, and organizing of parlor games are only so many futile attempts to deny the anguish caused by her husband's impending death. In addition we learn that Sally, who has miscarried several times in the past, is once again pregnant and fearful that she will lose this child too. While she is afraid of miscarrying, her husband, Sam, a gruff New Jersey building contractor, is inwardly terrified by the responsibilities of fatherhood, convinced that he has nothing "to give or teach, I'm empty. I'm just coasting." In each of these problems, we see life-sustaining relationships--marriage and parenthood--threatened by disruption and death. Nothing, not even our most cherished human connections, the play seems to suggest, can protect us from ultimate loss. This becomes explicit in the third act when Sally tries to warn Chloe and John's children of the dangers that surround them: CHLOE. You told them you'd seen the face of death and that there was no one to protect them As the play ends, each of the characters has come to accept this sad fact while still struggling to maintain the ties of love that make life bearable.
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THE CHARACTERS.
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SALLY. As the sister of the dead man who built the house, Sally seems the character most haunted by fears of loss and mortality. She is incommunicative at first, spending much of her time trying to paint a picture of the ocean, withdrawn into her own thoughts and feelings. She repeatedly expresses anxiety about a young swimmer whom she saw plunging into the sea that morning, and who has yet to return. That absent swimmer, like her dead brother, reinforces her sense of the vulnerability of life--an awareness sharpened by her three miscarriages. It is Sally who voices the most explicit awareness that human beings are utterly defenseless in a menacing world.
SAM. Despite his apparent toughness and aggressiveness, Sam, the building contractor from New Jersey, is probably the most insecure character in the play. As John observes at one point, Sam is the "least defended" member of the group. His insecurity ranges from the trivial--being embarrassed because he doesn't understand John's fancy vocabulary--to the profound: doubting his fitness to be a father. As a "regular guy" he feels uneasy surrounded by homosexuals, uncertain how to deal with these new neighbors whose behavior confounds and scandalizes him. And as a husband who has been betrayed by his wife, he nurses a simmering anger that boils over into physical violence at a crucial moment of the action. It is from Sam's habit of grinding his teeth in his sleep--a behavioral tic suggesting his inner tension--that the play takes its title. To help him break the habit, his doctor has advised that he repeat to himself before going to sleep the phrase, "Lips together, teeth apart"--which is how we would prepare for a kiss. CHLOE. Sam's sister, she describes herself as "a walking nerve end." She is the most manic member of the group, ceaselessly talking, performing, organizing meals and games. Her energy, like Sam's aggressiveness, conceals an inner terror, in her case the knowledge that her husband is dying. As she says, attempting to explain herself to John, "I notice what's going on around me. . . . I don't miss a thing. . . . I talk too much probably because it's too horrible to think about what's really going on." John on the other hand sees in her an extraordinary quality of "uncomplicated goodness." JOHN. John is the director of admissions at a fancy private school in New England, which sets him at a certain social distance from the other characters, especially Sam. Keeping others at arm's length is a central feature of his character. "To know me is not necessarily to like me," he says at one point. In fact, he sees himself as a "rotten son of a bitch" and he wishes he could change: "I really, really, really do. Profoundly. I can't." What he can't change is suggested by Chloe who tells us that "John sees the world as everyone else and him. We're all against him." As a result, he is emotionally reserved, withholding his deepest secrets even from the people who love him the most. "I respect the distance between people," he tells Sally, "I rather like it, in fact." |
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THEMES AND SYMBOLS.
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While the conflict between love and death is developed most fully in the relationships among the four characters, it is also explored through two symbols that are of major importance in the play.
A symbol is a sign whose meaning is largely conventional. For example, it is only social convention that teaches us that a gold band worn on the third finger of the left hand signifies that the wearer is married. The ring is a symbol of marriage. It is likewise a convention that the stars and stripes represent the United States. The flag is a symbol of the country. The symbolic meaning of an object is thus largely extrinsic rather than intrinsic, something attributed to the object rather than inherent in it. The first of these important symbols is the swimming pool, a dominant visual element of the play's setting. We all have a variety of associations with swimming pools: we connect them with recreation, pleasure, perhaps with a certain kind of shared amusement: "Everybody into the pool!" These are obvious associations, derived from the natural qualities and uses of a swimming pool. However, the play attributes other, less obvious, features to the pool on stage. For one thing, all the characters are reluctant to enter it, despite its attractiveness and convenience. Conspicuously shunned in this way, it acquires a quality of menace, which is reinforced by the comments characters make about it. "I'm sorry, but I'm very sensitive about pools," Sam says. "Our mother was very big on polio. . . . Grow up like that and you view a pool or a public toilet seat as a natural enemy." The pool is thus associated with disease and filth- -polio and public toilet seats. Why? Because, as we learn, all these characters share an unspoken fear that the pool is polluted. "We think it's infected. . . . We all think we'll get AIDS and die if we go in," Sally says, finally expressing their collective aversion to what should be one of the most appealing features of this luxurious house. But as everyone knows, David and his gay friends have been using this pool, and nobody wants to share what they might have left behind. Thus, the pool becomes a symbol because of the associations it gathers through the course of the action. We attribute a new meaning to this ordinary swimming pool, coming to see in it a symbolic representation of the way in which the ordinary joys of life are inevitably tainted by the dread of death. The second important symbol is the young swimmer about whom Sally worries throughout the first two acts. It is in him that the face of death finally becomes visible when he washes up drowned on the beach in front of the house. Sally had seen this young man earlier in the morning as he stripped off his robe and stepped naked into the ocean. At that moment, she says, she "knew he wouldn't come back and I didn't do anything." Instead, throughout the day she peers anxiously out to sea, hoping to see the young swimmer returning safely to shore. Ultimately, however, she realizes that she "let him swim out never to return. . . . My eyes didn't say 'Stay, life is worth living.' They said 'Go. . . .' My wave didn't say 'Hurry back, young man . . . . ' It said 'Goodbye, I know where you're going. I've wanted to go there too.'" Sally's relationship with this young man thus symbolizes all the human relationships in the play. Because of the certainty of death, every greeting implies a farewell, every connection a final severance. To risk knowing another, even for the moment that Sally knows the swimmer, is to accept the inevitability of parting and loss. Moreover, the ocean in which the swimmer dies is like an enormous version of the unused pool, beautiful and inviting, but deadly. Homo/Hetero. All the characters in this play are heterosexuals, and all feel some degree of aversion to homosexuality. But even though these characters seem to belong to a different world from their homosexual neighbors, the play suggests certain parallels between gays and straights. Most importantly, in both worlds love offers no protection from death. In the homosexual world, this vulnerability has been most terrifyingly manifested in the prevalence of AIDS, a disease in which a certain kind of love-making is itself the vehicle of death. But in the world of Sam and Sally, John and Chloe, love is no less menaced by mortality. John's cancer, Sally's miscarriages, the mortal wounds that infidelity inflicts on marriage--all remind us that when it comes to love and death, gays and straights share a universal human torment. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. Why is Sally fascinated by the challenge of painting the ocean?
2. Why does the author have the play take place on the Fourth of July? 3. Do you agree with Sally's opinion that we aren't safe in the world? 4. Why did John and Sally have an affair? What drew these two characters together? 5. Why does John have such a negative view of himself? 6. Should Sam and Sally keep the house or sell it? What do you think they will consider in making their decision? 7. Why do John and Sam fight? 8. Why does the play end with all the characters looking at a shooting star? 9. Do you think the swimmer committed suicide? If so, why? And why is Sally the only one concerned about him? 10. Do you think that it would be possible to get AIDS from swimming in the pool? |