Second Stage Theatre revives Terrence McNally’s 1991 drama with a cast led by Tracee Chimo

The best thing to come out of Second Stage Theatre’s revival of Lips Together, Teeth Apart is the vision of Tracee Chimo as Miss Adelaide in the musical Guys and Dolls. In Terrence McNally’s AIDS-themed drama, Chimo is Chloe, a Connecticut housewife whose single respite from domesticity is to work with a community-theater group. The hysterical vision of her practicing the kooky choreography for “Bushel and a Peck” along with tape-recorded piano chords is one of the few things this mostly miscast production, directed by Peter DuBois, actually gets right. Lips Together, which premiered in 1991, centers on a pair of fortysomething heterosexual couples: blue-collar Sam Truman (Michael Chernus) and his artist wife, Sally (America Ferrera), and the wealthier John Haddock (Austin Lysy), a prep-school admissions director, who’s married to Sam’s sister Chloe. The Haddocks are visiting the Trumans for July Fourth weekend at the Fire Island beach house that Sally inherited from her brother David, who died from an AIDS-related illness before the action begins. The weekend is rife with conflict. Both marriages are in the process of crumbling, there’s knowledge of extramarital affairs, and everyone is afraid to go in the crystalline pool (part of Alexander Dodge’s massive, believable beachfront set) out of fear they might get infected.