THEATER REVIEW : ‘Lips,’ an Elegiac Lament That Sings, Hits a Few Wrong Notes

Anyone who saw “The Lisbon Traviata” by Terrence McNally at the Mark Taper Forum three years ago should not be surprised that his new play, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” also at the Taper, is, above all, an elegiac lament for modern life built on distinctly musical movements.

McNally knows his music. And his theater. And it’s no accident that “Lips Together” opens and closes with soaring choruses from Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte,” an opera that, with its cruelties, disorientations and sexual innuendoes, bears more than a few connections to the theme of “Lips.”

If there is Angst and sadness behind those “Lips,” they are carefully hidden in humor and trivia. This makes for the kind of emotional counterpoint that has become a McNally hallmark. The play builds very slowly and requires that you pay attention. Structured the old-fashioned way--in three acts, with two 10-minute intermissions--it is a piece in which large hints are dropped in short throwaway lines. So it comes as no surprise that Chekhovian is a word often used to describe it.

In an upscale bleached wood beach-house, two couples, the Haddocks and the Trumans, are spending a lazy Fourth of July weekend--so lazy that nothing happens for most of Act One.

With its elegant wide deck, white furniture, functional swimming pool and shower (John Lee Beatty’s striking design), the house is the legacy of Sally Truman’s brother, who died of AIDS. It happens to be on Fire Island, that celebrated enclave of gay life, which isolates these heterosexual couples right away.

Sally (Roxanne Hart), a fey, overly sensitive Sunday painter, is married to an unlikely husband, Sam (Nathan Lane), a building contractor from New Jersey with few pretensions to art or intellect. With Sally and Sam are Sam’s sister Chloe Haddock (Andrea Martin)--a motormouth with a collection of beachwear as unremitting as her chatter--and husband John (John Glover), head of admissions at a boys’ prep school.

This is a play of indirection and modulations, of furtive revelations often made in brief, freeze-frame asides to the audience, like solo flutes interrupting a symphony. What McNally so ably captures in an age of plagues, dislocations and wars is the vague oppressiveness that invades our lives, and the effort expended to obliterate it.

All of the characters in “Lips Together” stalk around rarely mentioned or unspoken problems. We find out that hanky-panky has been going on among these four, that John is not a well man, that Sally and Sam have shared too many miscarriages, and that Chloe may not be quite the ditz she makes herself out to be.

Beyond Beatty’s set, all other production elements in the Taper production come from the original staging at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club: Jane Greenwood’s character-setting costumes, Ken Billington’s lighting (often suggestive of beach haze) and John Tillinger’s direction.

Tillinger, who also staged this playwright’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and “Lisbon Traviata,” is a deft hand at McNally and almost manages to overcome some of this play’s inconsistencies and languors. But not quite.

Casting is all-important in a play so dependent on character, and, at the Taper, it is not always satisfying. Lane is the only holdover from the New York company and, as he was in “Lisbon Traviata,” he is the show’s beating heart. An actor of impeccable honesty, he transmits Sam’s pain and self-doubt in mini-displays of playfulness alternating with naked anger that eventually explode in some major fisticuffs with the deceitful John.

(Note: Lane remains with the company only through Aug. 29, to be replaced by Ethan Phillips for the rest of the run.)

Glover’s John is an eloquent sparring partner, a liar and elitist with tell-tale biases. But his mortality haunts him, and fear of dying has done nothing to improve his character. Only his showdown with Sam elicits a moment of truth. . . .

The women in the company have a more trying time. Hart plays the misunderstood loner in Sally so self-consciously it just makes her look posy. It’s hard to empathize with her emotional turmoil or her obsession with an offstage swimmer’s plight (one of McNally’s more calculated bits of symbolism). And how she came to marry a man like Sam is anyone’s guess.

Martin’s Chloe can also wear on the nerves. She seems to anticipate the laughs her nonstop chatter is designed to provoke, which makes the performance too often more irritating than funny. This is particularly damaging to the later scenes in which Chloe turns out to be this quartet’s most honest spirit. But again, she’s an improbable wife for the intellectual pretender, John, even if this mismatch helps explain John’s roving eye.

These are mostly the playwright’s choices and they do strain credibility. As long as one can suspend disbelief (more possible with a more cohesive company perhaps), “Lips Together” can be enjoyed for the keenness of its perception into human discomfort. It doesn’t have the flash and brilliance of his “Lisbon Traviata,” but given time and some indulgence, it finally bares its teeth.

* “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 19. $22-$36; (213) 365-6500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Andrea Martin: Chloe Haddock

Nathan Lane: Sam Truman

John Glover: John Haddock

Roxanne Hart: Sally Truman

A Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum presentation of a play by Terrence McNally. Director John Tillinger. Sets John Lee Beatty. Lights Ken Billington. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Original sound design Stewart Werner, Chuck London. Fight staging Jerry Mitchell. Production stage manager James T. McDermott. Stage manager Richard W. Force.