Lips Together, Teeth Apart

Drama Desk Award Winner for Outstanding New Play

One of Mr. McNally’s finest plays-and one that hasn’t dated, despite its apparently topical subject matter. -The New York Times

McNally’s wit and wild comedy invariably score, and his darker intentions resonate, making Lips Together one of his most accomplished plays. -New York Daily News

A brilliant comedy. -The New Yorker

At the heart of this haunting play is a dramatically incisive portrait of two married couples-the Trumans and the Haddocks. Uncomfortable with themselves and each other, they are forced to spend a Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island house that the brother of one of the women left his sister when he died of AIDS. Though the house is beautiful, it is as empty as their lives and marriages have become, a symbol of their failed hopes, their rage, their fears, and of the capricious nature of death. Acerbic and haunting, Lips Together, Teeth Apart probes the stifled lives of people and their prejudices with a stunning clarity that resonates long after.

The author of such critically acclaimed plays as The Lisbon Traviata and Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune, Terrence McNally has graced the American theater with a voice that captures our fear of intimacy in the modern age with dead-on insight, wit, and poignancy. But never has he blended these disparate elements into such a brilliantly cohesive whole as he has in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, hailed by Frank Richard of the New York Times as McNally’s most ambitious and most accomplished play yet.