Lips Together Teeth Apart
by Terrence McNally

Oh, to know what your friends are thinking

Director Dave Simms wonders about this as much as any of us and it is one of the reasons the Terrence McNally play Lips Together, Teeth Apart seemed so attractive.

Not only was it funny and melancholic but also it presented characters who stepped aside from the cut and thrust of the plot to speak their thoughts directly to the audience.

"Then they go back into the action and the audience knows things the other characters in the play don't know, for instance, when one of them is pregnant but she has been having an affair with another man," says Simms.

"Even her husband doesn't know she's pregnant and the audience is already wondering if the child is his or not."

This canny playwriting device adds yet another layer of fun and intrigue into this American play, which is having its SA premiere with Mixed Salad Productions at the little Star Theatre this month.

"It's about two couples spending a weekend at a beach house and the theatre is so intimate that the audience can almost feel it is sitting on the deck with the characters," enthuses Simms.

Terrence McNally is the writer of renown works such Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Love! Valour! Compassion! both of which have been presented by the award-winning Adelaide company, Mixed Salad Productions.

In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, one of the women has inherited a beachhouse after her brother died of AIDS. It turns out that it is in a gay seaside ghetto and straight couples are not in the majority.

"This play relates to gay couples as well as straight ones and it remains topical with all this talk of the damage that would be done to marriage if everyone had a go at it," says Simms.

"Why can't everyone muck it up? Why shouldn't everyone suffer the pain of a bad marriage? Terrence McNally never writes plays which are straightforward."

Samela Harris - 13 October 2011

SA Premiere - Lips Together, Teeth Apart, by Terrence McNally

One beach house; two married couples … it’s going to be a long, long weekend!

John’s jumpy, Chloe’s hyper, Sam’s sulking and Sally’s upset - but for once they have time to think about life’s big questions in Mixed Salad Productions’ SA premiere of Terrence McNally’s play Lips Together, Teeth Apart.

Through monologues unheard by others, the characters reveal a desperate sense of individual isolation. The only people these four characters find more alien are the unseen men partying in the houses on either side of them. As they divert themselves from their own mortality with food, cocktails, the crossword puzzle, fireworks, charades and biting jabs at each other and the boys next door, the two couples find little to celebrate. But if they can find the answers to their questions they might be able to sleep at night without grinding their teeth.

Lips Together, Teeth Apart will be performed at Star Theatre Two 145 Sir Donald Bradman Dr, Hilton from 21 October to 5 November, Thursday to Saturdays at 8.00pm. Sunset performances will be held at 6.30pm on 26, 30 October and 2 November. A preview will be held on 20 October at 8.00pm. Tickets are priced from $15 and on sale atwww.mixedsalad.com.au or 0439 533 173. The play is presented by arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, on behalf of Dramatists Play Service Inc, New York.

Dave Simms directs this new Adelaide production which stars Peter Davies as John, Steve Parker as Sam, Nicole Rutty as Chloe and Tracey Walker as Sally.

Dave Simms said, ‘The two couples are funny, yet not easy to like; we see them argue, put on brave faces and we also get the chance to hear them thinking. I hope that by laughing at Chloe and watching all the characters changing attitudes to topics such as marriage and gay men, we will be reminded that it's important to care for friends, be loyal to family and respect people different to ourselves.’

The New York Times said, ‘Lips Together, Teeth Apart, a work with real teeth and equally penetrating compassion, cannot take away that fear of death. But it does something that the theatre must do now more than ever, by leaving an audience exiled from paradise feeling considerably less alone.’

Playwright Terrence McNally was born in Florida in 1939. He attended Columbia University in New York and subsequently became a protégé of playwright Edward Albee. He wrote Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune in 1982 and its screen adaptation which starred Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in 1991. He won the 1993 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman. Many of his plays have gay themes including Love! Valour! Compassion! which examines the relationships of eight gay men; and Some Men, a history of gay landmarks in America. Master Class (1995), a character study of legendary opera soprano Maria Callas won the Tony for Best Play.

Since 2003, Mixed Salad has won multiple awards and gained a reputation for staging brave and new work in South Australia. Hits such as Five women wearing the same dress, The History Boys, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Out in the Open and Feelgood have definitely put Mixed Salad Productions on the map!

For further media information:
Neil Ward Publicity 08 8361 3577, 0438 095 580 neil@neilwardpublicity.com.au

21 September 2011

Lips Together Teeth Apart is a very funny and sympathetic look at the place of secrets in our lives, and the role of our deepest unspoken desires, though here they're spoken directly to the audience.

Mixed Salad Productions continues to bring us confronting plays of life, love and sex.

The audience is right on deck with the actors, a situation at once voyeuristic and claustrophobic.

Director Dave Simms has brought together a strong cast and the core of the play is searchingly drawn out.

Nicole Rutty as Chloe creates a totally convincing picture of self obsession, balanced against the stillness of her sister-in-law Sally, a beautifully articulated performance by Tracey Walker, whose vision of the naked swimmer striking out to sea and suicide recurs through the play.

Steve Parker as her husband Sam brings a physicality and masculinity to his role and Peter Davies as John, whose own secret we know early, conveys his longing for life and his sister-in-law with subtlety.

The decision to relocate the play from Fire Island to Port Douglas, and the subsequent rewriting of some of the local colour frees the cast from the tyranny of American accents without doing damage to Terrence McNally's story.

Ewart Shaw - 1 November 2011

ONE way to find out who your friends are is to go away for a weekend together.

Mixed Salad's love affair with Terrence McNally's work continues with this couples comedy that mixes drama with relationship humour.

Director Dave Simms finds grist for his emotional mill as Chloe and John Haddock and Sally and Sam Truman take a beach house.

Throw in infidelity, a dead sibling, relentless entertaining, arm twisting, star and navel gazing and gay boys next door, and you have ingredients for a revealing weekend away.

Nicole Rutty is the control freak as cloying Chloe, whose open wound approach gives everyone a chance to despise her.

Peter Davies does well as impregnable husband John. Steve Parker nails Chloe's burly brother, down-to-earth Sam, who prefers uncomplicated company. Tracey Walker is wonderfully weary as his withdrawn wife Sally.

Matt Byrne - 30 October 2011

One of the central themes of Lips Together, Teeth Apart is people’s attitudes to homosexuality – dealing with fear, ignorance and irrational ideas.

Yet the play’s only characters are two heterosexual married couples, who are very much fish out of water as they are thrust into an inherited beach house in a gay community due to a death in the family caused by AIDS.

Sally Truman (Tracey Walker) has recently lost her brother David to the dreadful disease and is staying at the house on New Year’s Eve with her husband Sam (Steve Parker), Sam’s needy sister Chloe Haddock (Nicole Rutty) and her husband John (Peter Davies).

The local gay community is represented by two sets of neighbours, heard partying as they also prepare to see in the new year. They are spoken to by our characters over each side fence, but not seen.

Another unseen character is a young man, presumed to be a member of the local community, who neatly folds his clothes on the beach and swims out to sea, never to be seen alive again. His solitary swim is witnessed by Sally, who despite suffering anguish over his likely fate, does nothing to intervene. Recurring throughout the play, the fate of this unseen character and his relationship to Sally seems to symbolise the anguish and solitude of each of the main characters living within their own strained relationships.

They’re each dealing with their issues of unfulfilled ambition, infidelity, financial problems, class distinction, responsibility and grieving. Looming large over them all is the swimming pool, inviting yet possibly dangerous – after all, who knows what might have happened in that pool with Sally’s brother and his gay friends! At least that’s how they all see it. Not one of them is game enough to take the plunge and leap in to the unknown, or to confront their prejudices and problems.

This play was written 20 years ago and we would hope many of the attitudes have diminished, if not disappeared altogether, which sadly they haven’t.

If all this sounds a bit gloomy, don’t despair! There are plenty of laughs in this skilfully written work – directed here by Dave Simms – and the characters, despite their frailties and prejudices, are likeable and enjoyable. The performances are well crafted within this fine ensemble work.

Steve Parker is suitably knock-about as the hard-working Sam, contrasted with Peter Davies’ further up the middle-class John. We sympathise with Tracey Walker’s Sally and her struggles, and are totally blown away by the performance of Nicole Rutty, who steals scene after scene as the needy, flamboyant, over-the-top Chloe. The part is clearly written for this sort of impact, but still needs to be skilfully played. The irony is that her character seems to be the most fragile and flawed, but ends up being the one most able to deal with her own problems and those of the others. Her regular outbursts of snippets of songs from rather lightweight musicals she has performed in as an amateur are hilarious.

There is also a superbly choreographed fight scene, which turns the tide for each character and perhaps places their issues into perspective. There are real scratches and scrapes evident here as the two male characters have a real ding-dong go at each other.

It’s certainly worth the admission price, especially if you don’t mind having to look upward at the outdoor deck stage setting if you are in one of the first few rows.

At the Star Theatre until November 2.

Stephen Horne - 25 October 2011

Directed by Dave Simms and written by Terrence McNally, Lips Together Teeth Apart is another fine production from Mixed Salad Productions.

It is about two couples – Sally (Tracey Walker) and Sam (Steve Parker), and Chloe (Nicole Rutty) and John (Peter Davies)–who spend New Year’s Eve at a beach house that Sally has inherited from her recently deceased gay brother who died of AIDS. The four holiday makers are all rigidly straight but the weekender is situated in a primarily gay beach neighbourhood. The play explores the intricacies of the relationships within and between each couple, and uses the topic of homosexuality as a device to assist in laying bare some of their raw emotions and beliefs.

Sally loved her brother, but hated the fact that he was gay and that he had a deeply caring partner. Sam spies two unseen men having sex in the sand hills and is strangely moved by an overt display of tenderness and mutual caring, something that he misses in his own life. Chloe, who is very theatrical, or at least thinks she is, can’t resist ‘flirting’ across the fence with the gay neighbours and finds comfort in being extroverted, something that she misses in the confines of her marriage to John who has recently been diagnosed with cancer and who aches to be back in his now concluded adulterous relationship with Sally.

The play was written in 1991, some ten years after HIV/AIDS was first recognised, and is a product of its time. Some of the dialogue is now arguably cringe-worthy, and society has moved on from some of the more narrow minded and ill-informed attitudes expressed in the play. Or has it? The play still has relevance for today’s audience, but Simms didn’t need to relocate the play from its original setting of Fire Island in the 1990s–a popular gay retreat near New York City–to the here and now in far north Queensland. But it didn’t really matter.

The play has is no great theme or single underlying message – it is simply a provoking examination of human frailties and yearnings. There are no high-points when everything is revealed – in fact we learn many of the innermost secrets and fears of the characters through a series of monologues quite early in the play. This interesting device allows the action to evolve in a strangely disconnected way rather than move to the march of a tight programme. In some ways the characters are rather unsatisfying and by the end of the play we feel we have only been allowed to see a glimpse of them.

Parker plays Sam with an uncompromising hardness. We see him at his worst when he wrestles with John in a well choreographed but perhaps too intense fight scene. Davies gives John a detachment that is puzzling and unsettling. Walker imbues Sally with a restrained sensitivity and compassion. Rutty is superb as the unsettled and unsettling Chloe. She provides the comic relief intended by the playwright in a well directed and studied demonstration of timing, intonation, gesture and generally exquisite stagecraft.

The set was a simple deck with an implied swimming pool in the foreground, and a painted abstract backdrop loudly and proudly proclaiming diversity. The lighting comfortably supported the action of the plot within the limitations of the rig of Star Theatre Two.

Kym Clayton - 24 October 2011

At curtain rise, Sam tests the chlorine level of the swimming pool at a beautiful beach property within a gay community.

Sam, with wife Sally, sister Chloe and her husband John - all 40 somethings - are spending New Year’s Eve weekend at the house which Sam’s wife Sally recently inherited from her gay brother after his death from AIDS.
Sam believes that they should not swim in the pool as they might get AIDS. The others agree.

American playwright Terrence McNally uses the age-old Shakespearian stage convention of monologues, unheard by the others, which the characters deliver as asides to the audience, giving us insights into the desperate sense of loneliness suffered by each of them.

The two couples jibe at each other incessantly and find distractions to prevent themselves from perceiving their own mortality. John does crosswords, Sally paints, Chloe sings and dances, Sam finds delight in shouting obscenities about the choice of music of the gay neighbours on either side.

Sounds like a gloomy night in the theatre, but playwright McNally obtains great comic mileage from his wonderful understanding of what makes marriages work (or not). Through his insights and wit we see the humorous situations of both marriage and probably gay relationships. Perhaps there is little difference.

The characters are representatives of humankind; they are paradigms; they are Everyman. We see ourselves in each of them, but we don’t really like what we see most of the time.

Director Dave Simms has assembled an excellent cast of experienced actors who have responded to his superlative direction with great depth and sensitivity. The ensemble playing in the close confines of the intimate Star Theatre 2, is first rate. As the hyper active Chloe Haddock, Nicole Rutty is at her best. She is babbles endlessly about nothing in particular (often in schoolgirl French) and to quote one of her own lines she is “a walking nerve end.” Rutty plays the neurotic suburban wife and mother with panache.

Peter Davies inhabits the role of Chloe’s grumpy husband to the point that if he does another crossword the audience would get up and rip the paper from his hand. John is suffering from throat cancer but Davies, to his credit, does not make us dislike him any the less.

Tracy Walker is convincing in her role as she strives to make the others understand about the missing swimmer she sees out at sea, but her guilt after her affair with John prevents her enjoying the weekend festivities.
Sally’s husband Sam is played as an “ocker” by Steve Parker and his portrayal is very effective and sensitive, particularly when he reveals that he has a psychological problem preventing him from being able to tie the knot in his tie properly.

Bill Ramsey’s setting of a posh middle class seaside beach house works wonders on the pocket handkerchief stage. Likewise for Martin Gilbert’s lighting plot particularly during the monologue scenes.
Director Simms has brought the mise-en scene from the Manhattan Theatre Club of 1991 into the near- present and local Australian.

But the attitudes to homosexuality and HIV/AIDS are firmly locked into the hysteria of twenty years ago, when most of us had only vague notions of how to “catch” it. Do we still believe we get it from diving into a swimming pool?

Richard Lane - 25 October 2011

I’m not scared of too many things

Brown snakes, vegans, parallel parking, and my first wife are really the only things that make me quake in fear – but one thing I am certainly not scared of is gay men.

Terrence McNally’s sensitive and compassionate melodrama “Lips Together Teeth Apart” suffers from a dated central conceit. The quartet of characters are all, in different ways, frightened of AIDS and deeply suspicious of homosexual men. This must have been a brave and confrontational work in 1991, but in the twenty years since it was written, attitudes have thankfully changed. Whilst homophobia may not have abated significantly (gay marriage, anyone?), AIDS education has successfully calmed the irrational fears we may have had in the early years of this disease. The emotional impulses on stage, therefore, are slightly at odds with current views.

This is only a minor concern. This is a very successful and satisfying production. Director Dave Simms has intelligently created a believable and truthful world, and has drawn touching and finely-calibrated performances from his actors. Sims sets the tone of naturalistic tragedy well; a bit more emphasis on humour would have balanced some of the script’s more sentimental moments.

The story and structure are simple: two couples spend a weekend at Sally’s waterfront beach house, which Sally has just inherited from her brother, who died of AIDS. The New Year’s Eve celebrations include Sally’s aggressive husband Sam and their friends, the self-consciously flamboyant Chloe and her curmudgeon husband John. Over a day, the veneer of politeness is cracked and secrets emerge. Violence, hatred, birth, death and infidelity are all on show (McNally doesn’t hold back with issews!). Each character’s internal voice is spoken in snatches of short monologues as the action plays around them.

The highlight of this production is the acting: each performer brings a rich and balanced portrayal to their character. The quiet moments of tragedy are particularly moving. Peter Davies is perfectly cast and gives a superb rendering of the grumpy, scabrous John. His characterisation seems unnecessarily sharp and nasty until the reason behind it is later revealed (you can feel the audience think “Aaah, that’s why he’s been so awful”): this is a touching performance. Tracey Walker gives a measured and affecting performance as the grieving and troubled Sally. It is a difficult role: the play effectively revolves around her and Sally does not have much opportunity to break out of hand-wringing mode, but Walker’s skill prevents Sally from being whiny and shrill. Steve Parker as Sam, Sally’s husband, shows a disturbing brutality and a confused nastiness. Nicole Rutty has perhaps the hardest task of all in making the vacuous and superficial Chloe a well-rounded character and not just the comic foil. At first, her bulldozerish, pushy, honking jollity seems forced, but as the story progresses, her behaviour is explained. Rutty manages to be very funny and truly awful at once – another smart performance in this excellent ensemble.

McNally’s text is over-long and tends to over-explain (I wanted to yell “I get it!” as the play wound to its close); it veers towards the mawkish at the end which undermines the subtle sadness. But it remains a wonderful and rewarding production.

John Wells- 24 October 2011