The summer ocean swells ominously, and even the beckoning swimming pool proves uninviting in Terrence McNally’s 1991 play “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.” Intimations of mortality seem immanent: The mere zapping of a mosquito strikes an unsettling note in this tender, subtly drawn comedy-drama, set during the height of the AIDS crisis, about two couples visiting the Fire Island home of a relative who has recently died.
Unfortunately, the middling revival that opened on Wednesday night at the Second Stage Theater doesn’t fully excavate the rich seams of feeling in this, one of Mr. McNally’s finest plays — and one that hasn’t dated, despite its apparently topical subject matter. (It’s infinitely better than his cough-and-you’ve-missed-a-dropped-name comedy “It’s Only a Play,” Broadway’s toughest ticket.) While the cast features four talented young actors, including America Ferrera (of “Ugly Betty”) and the versatile Tracee Chimo (“Bad Jews”), their performances, under the direction of Peter DuBois, tend to Jet Ski along the crests of the writing.
Ms. Ferrera portrays Sally Truman, who has inherited the beautiful wooden beach house, with ample deck and that small swimming pool, from her brother David, who has died of AIDS. (The architecture and various clues in the dialogue make it clear that the house, mouth-wateringly handsome in Alexander Dodge’s design, is in Fire Island Pines, the higher-end gay enclave on the island.) Sally and her husband, Sam (Michael Chernus, of Annie Baker’s “The Aliens”), who live in Trenton, are sharing the house for the holiday weekend with Sam’s sister Chloe (Ms. Chimo) and her husband, John (Austin Lysy).
All are impressed by the beauty of the house and the island, and almost equally fascinated — with an edge of curiosity and, for some, repellence — by the local fauna. By which I do not mean the deer that mosey along the boardwalks, but the gay men who are hosting parties in the adjacent houses, and send friendly greetings and invitations their way. (At one point, Sam spies a couple having sex on the beach and provides a detailed description of their coupling.)
Mr. McNally, who soon after wrote a play about gay men’s response to the devastation of the AIDS crisis — the equally fine “Love! Valour! Compassion!” — here explores how it reverberates in the lives of the (heterosexual) families left behind, although the subject mostly arises only obliquely. Until a spasm of frustration from Sally toward the end of the play, the ghost of her dead brother and the frightening specter of the disease that took his life are almost unseen presences in the play.
Nothing of serious moment takes place during the weekend. Mr. McNally is writing in Chekhovian mode, allowing suggestion and intimation to do much of the dramatic work. Sally spends the days painting, lost in her own thoughts, clearly still mourning her brother. The husbands exchange husband and family talk: Chloe and John have three children staying with relatives, while Sam and Sally are still childless and hoping. Chloe, the most outgoing of the group, dashes in and out of the kitchen, annotating her every move with a snippet of a show tune.
But the atmosphere is continually stirred by suggestions of discomfort, melancholy and anxiety. Ms. Ferrera’s Sally cannot stop worrying about the man she’s spied swimming far out in the ocean — too far out, she’s sure. Her tenseness is in part a natural reaction, but Ms. Ferrera also makes clear that her guilt about her ambivalent attitude toward her brother’s sexuality — and the fact that she can no longer resolve it with him — has inspired her near-obsession with this stranger possibly at risk.
Interactive Feature: Fall Arts Preview - Times 100
Sam feels uncomfortable being surrounded by gay men. The friendly greetings from next door leave him uneasy. “Imagine if they thought we were queer,” he mutters when John suggests he wave back. “I’m gonna sit with my legs apart and smoke a cigar all weekend.” Mr. Chernus, with his burly geniality, brings out the character’s natural warmth, but Sam’s heartsore spirit — he and Sally’s marriage has gone slack — is only glancingly on view.
John doesn’t need any environmental cues to tune into an awareness of life’s tenuousness; he feels it in his bones. In one of the monologues that season the play, he tells Sally that he has cancer. “It’s only a little speck now, a microscopic dot of pain and terror,” he says quietly, “but they tell me it will soon grow and ripen and flower in this fertile bed of malignancy that has somehow become my body.”
Mr. Lysy’s haunted delivery of this monologue is lovely. He works his way into the delicate emotional layers of the play more persuasively than the rest of the cast. How we talk about death — or rather how we do not talk about it — forms a keenly moving strand in the play, and Mr. Lysy’s John naturally feels the inhibitions surrounding it most acutely.
Ms. Chimo, a blazing comic actress, brings a bright, snappy presence to Chloe, whose shrill voice is like the squawking of a sea bird circling endlessly overhead. She plays Chloe’s pushy, sometimes crass antics to the hilt, but we don’t get much sense of the antsy desperation underneath them: Chloe’s fears for her husband’s health and her worries about his fidelity.
All four actors hit the emotional notes squarely and without unnecessary fireworks. But beneath the chatter about kite flying and burger grilling, we should register a sense of emotional isolation that bedevils all the characters, who have reached the age when losses have begun to pile up and life’s ultimate horizon is on view. (It probably doesn’t help that the actors may all be a bit young for their roles.)
Words help paper over this sorrowful understanding or at least distract us from it, but as Sally observes at one point, the hollow grooves of idle conversation can also leave us lonelier than ever. “Why do people have to speak to one another?” she says in one of the play’s most heartbreaking lines. “Why can’t we just be?”