‘Lips Together, Teeth Apart’ Will Be Produced at SCR

Terrence McNally’s elegiac comedy, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” will fill the final slot of the South Coast Repertory’s 1993-94 season on the Second Stage (April 26-May 29), the theater has announced.

“Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” a three-act work in a Chekovian mood, is about two mismatched couples whose troubles are revealed during a lazy Fourth of July weekend at an expensive beach house on Fire Island.

The comedy had its world premiere in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1991 and its West Coast premiere in San Diego in 1992 at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre. The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles also gave it a mainstage production last summer.

McNally is perhaps best known for his bittersweet drama, “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,” which SCR did on the Second Stage in 1989, and his brilliantly funny “The Lisbon Traviata.”

Although SCR has yet to announce it, theater officials also say the opening show of the 1994-95 season in September will be the Tennessee Williams classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on the Mainstage. It is to star Kandis Chappell, a frequent SCR guest artist, as Blanche. The theater’s co-founder, Martin Benson, will direct.