Painting Churches by Tina Howe

First published: 1984

First produced: 1983, at The Second Stage, South Street Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: A townhouse in Beacon Hill, Boston

Principal Characters:

• Fanny Sedgwick Church, a woman in her sixties from a fine old Boston family
• Gardner Church, Fanny’s husband, an eminent poet in his seventies from an even finer New England family
• Margaret “Mags” Church, Gardner and Fanny’s daughter, a painter in her early thirties

The Play

As the play begins, Fanny and Gardner Church have sold their Boston town house and will move in a week to their much smaller cottage on Cape Cod. Their daughter Mags, whose arrival from New York they eagerly await, plans to paint their portrait and help them pack. When she arrives she tells them about her success as an artist. Although they express their delight, they do so with their mouths full of crackers, and they continue to be absorbed in eating crackers as Mags goes on about her success. Later Mags is dismissive when Fanny tells her how impossible Gardner is becoming in his mental wanderings. Scene 1 ends with Fanny and Gardner playfully practicing poses for their portrait by making silly faces.

In scene 2 Mags nails up a crimson tablecloth as a portrait backdrop, oblivious to her mother’s protests about the damage she is doing. Her parents clown by miming Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, and Mags complains they do not take her seriously. She talks about her first group show, at which her mother called attention to herself and disparaged her daughter’s paintings in front of an important art critic. While Mags relates this humorous story of her embarrassment and exasperation, her parents continue to amuse themselves by posing as Michelangelo’s sculpture Pietà, and his fresco The Creation of Adam.

Scene 3 ends on a grimmer note. Mags reminds her parents that at age nine she was banished from the dinner table for playing with her food. Oblivious to her mother’s requests to stop her account, she explains that, sent to her room with a tray, she would flush the food down the toilet and melt crayons on the radiator. Every week she would use her allowance to buy and melt more crayons, imagining a taste for each color and becoming more and more hungry. By the time her parents discovered her creation, it had in Mags’s mind come to resemble a “gigantic Viennese pastry.” However, Fanny thought it disgusting and got rid of it. Act 1 ends with Fanny and Gardner left speechless as Mags rushes from the room after insisting they knew nothing of her artistic abilities—that she had and has them.

In act 2, scene 1, Gardner tells Mags he has been having disturbing dreams in which he is a child, strangers move into his house and take over his things, and his bed is empty as if he were dead or never existed. As his wife packs his books and papers, he becomes agitated. Mags reads a few pages her father has been typing and is surprised to see evidence of what Fanny told her earlier, that his mental wanderings make no sense. Later Fanny laughs about Gardner’s incontinence and need for diapers. Mags is appalled and, after Fanny engages her husband in a game of dive bombing his papers into a packing carton, Mags berates her for treating him like a child. Fanny replies that Mags should open her eyes and see the reality of her aging parents. What is wrong with trying to have some fun in a grim situation? Fanny asks, and adds that she and Mags’s father are moving to their small cottage so she more easily can care for him. She tells Mags to paint them as they are and points to Gardner playing on the floor with a paper glider.

In the play’s final scene, a parrot Gardner has been training to recite Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) does so. Mags recalls a magical night when phosphorus was in the ocean and she and her father swam together, iridescent and laughing. In fifteen minutes a car will come to take her parents away, and she begins to panic about their reaction to her portrait of them, which she finished by staying up all night. They insist on seeing it, and Mags’s panic turns to joy as she realizes they like it. It is inspired by a Pierre-Auguste Renoir café scene with dancers, Fanny says, and Gardner begins to dance her around the room. Offstage a car horn honks. The curtain falls as Mags watches her dancing parents with tears in her eyes.

Dramatic Devices

Howe’s single set has “three soaring arched windows,” suggestive of a church, with its air of authority and awe. By going home, Mags reenters that which was in her childhood a space of parental authority and awe (surely Howe chose her characters’ family name for its significance). The changing light pouring through the windows functions to transform what it touches: At play’s end, for instance, it should be “dreamy and dappled” as the Churches dance in a gentle moment out of time. The Chopin waltz heard when they dance also communicates that they are removed from everyday reality, just as the honking car horn symbolizes the flow of time to which they are being summoned back. Their furnishings, a mix of the tasteful and the odd, reflect their personalities. Fanny’s very clothing when the audience first see her echoes this mix as she sits wearing a worn bathrobe and a stylish hat. Mags, who has gone off to New York and become her own person, “wears wonderfully distinctive clothes and has very much her own look.”

The packing cartons on stage are another dramatic device. They are empty, then overflowing, then filled with clothing as well as household items, then fewer in number, and finally gone. They symbolize the passing of time as the Churches move toward their end. The gradual stripping of the house also accompanies “the psychological stripping bare of the characters,” as critic Christopher Bigsby has noted.

Gardner’s recitations function powerfully in the play, the gorgeous language emphasizing his love of poetry and the nobility of his calling. Yet, he now can only parrot words, not write them, symbolized by his teaching a parrot to recite the elegy by Gray. That poem itself suggests Gardner’s declining faculties and imminent end.

Finally one should note the play’s tableaux. Such instantly recognized images suggest art’s power to inhabit consciousness and, as frozen moments, its ability to arrest time. The Churches’ delight in enacting these tableaux communicates the fun they share. Insofar as they do so while Mags wants them to take her seriously, their play suggests that aspect of a couple’s relationship which is separate from their children. However, the fact that the final tableau is inspired by Mags’s painting, as well as by Renoir’s, makes her a part of her parents’ dancing even while she is apart from it.

Critical Context

Sigmund Freud noted the painful necessity for individuals, if they are to develop, to become free of their parents’ authority. Freud’s observations seem relevant to Mags’s traumatic childhood experience of banishment from the table and the destruction of her composition of melted crayons. The distancing from her parents, who did not recognize what she considers to be her first masterpiece, went in tandem with the beginning of her development as an artist. By writing a drama treating the psychological dynamics at play among the Churches—their tensions, rivalries, shifting alliances, and rejoicings—Howe engages that recurrent subject in American theater going back to Eugene O’Neill, the nuclear family.

The subject is common to Howe’s other plays, as is her obsession with artists and art, and with the losses attendant upon time, especially death. In all her work she explores these subjects with humor while moving toward an epiphany, a moment of reconciliation or redemption. Because of the epiphanies, Howe speculates, her true mentors are not other playwrights, but the novelists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Howe attributes audiences’ warm reception of Painting Churches to the “sheer fantasy” of the reconciliation at the play’s end: “In real life, we all know perfectly well there’s rarely that moment when our parents finally say, ‘You are a wonderful artist, and I admire your work.’”

Sources for Further Study

Barlow, Judith E. “The Art of Tina Howe.” In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Bigsby, Christopher. “Tina Howe.” In Contemporary American Playwrights. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Howe, Tina. Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989.

Howe, Tina. “Tina Howe.” In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987.

Howe, Tina. “Tina Howe.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights, edited by John L. DiGaetani. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Howe, Tina. “Tina Howe.” Interview by Judith E. Barlow. In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.