Lips Together, Teeth Apart: Another Version of Pastoral

Lips Together, Teeth Apart: Another Version of Pastoral BENILDE MONTGOMERY When Robert Brustein pigeonholes Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, as yet another instance of "Yuppie Realism," he fails to notice that, unlike some other plays which he consigns to this genre, McNally's play does indeed reach past the idiosyncratic and into the "public dimension" that Brustein wishes it might. Rather than write a playas "self-regarding, as selfenclosed , as unanchored as the society it depicts,'" McNally has anchored his . play securely in a quite public and ancient literary tradition - the pastoral. Moreover, McNally's use of traditional pastoral materials and his arrangement of them into what Thomas Greene might call "heuristic imitation'" gives the playa voice that is unique in McNally's canon and rescues it from the "desultory" social thematics that Brustein abhors. "Pastoral" is, of course, a notoriously eely term. In its broadest sense, "pastoral" here will name that mode of the tradition which "maintains its identity through an awareness of its mainspring in the bucolic poems of Theocritus and Virgil."3In a more restrictive sense "pastoral" will denote that dimension of the tradition which posits that tbere exists somewhere (in remote places such as the mountains of Sicily or Arcadia) a society of herdsmen and shepherds who live in hannony with each other, and with the world of nature, its scenery. animals, and gods. These herdsmen combine a life of rustic simplicity (and simplicity of thought and emotion) with the desire and skill to express this simplicity in music. ... Their happiness is sometimes disrupted by sadness. '.. Bur this too is converted into song, and the beauty of the song somehow restores the sense of past~ral hannony.4 One critic goes so far as to say that "in Virgil Arcadia is hardly more than a 'sound of music. ",' Perhaps this interdependence of music and pastoral is what first led McNally to explore the possibilities of writing a play which Modern Droma, 36 (1993) 547 BENILDE MONTGOMERY evokes the mood and conventions of the classic genre. His extensive knowledge of opera, whose origins in sixteenth-century pastoral drama are well documented," and his frequent dramatic use of it and other musical forms suggest both a source for his interest and an awareness of its theatrical potential. McNally's television adaptation of his own short play, Andre's Mother (March, 1990), for example, uses as its musical theme the aria "L'amero, saro costante" from Mozart's II Re Pastore. In the opera, this aria is sung by the shepherd Aminta, a character borrowed by Metastasio from its most popular incarnation in Tasso, but who as Amyntas appears first in Theocritus's Idyll 7 and throughout the subsequent tradition. Produced one year after Andre's Mother, Ups Together, Teeth Apart (May, 1991) uses Mozart's trio "Soave sia il vento" in a similar way. In addition, two aspects of the history of the pastoral tra!lilion converge in McNally's play: the frequent appropriation of pastol al by the "homosexual literary tradition"? and its popUlarity during times of cultural crisis. Beginning with Virgil's Eclogue 2 and ending with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Byrne Fone has shown how "Arcadia" has entered into the "gay sensibility" as a metaphor which, among other things, validates certain myths prevalent in homosexual life, namely, that there is a place where it is "safe to be gay," and that "homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality and is a divinely sanctioned means to an understanding of the good and the beautiful.,,8 Moreover , in calling "war" the ultimate "anti-pastoral," Paul Fussell, citing Northrop Frye, calls our attention to the fact that not only is the pastoral world the model "by which the [war's) demonism is measured'" but also in Western literature it frequently becomes the model against which all social crisis is measured. While Fussell reminds us that Wilfred Owen spent his free time during the First World War reading Barbusse's Under Fire as well as the idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, we ought not to forget that Virgil's Eclogues themselves were written during the political crisis following the assassination of Julius Caesar and...