Chasing Manet

What a joy it is to have a new play by Tina Howe, my favorite contemporary playwright. Chasing Manet is pure Howe -- quirky, delightful characters and laugh-out-loud humor, combined with revealing glimpses into the valiant struggle of the human spirit. It’s her first new play in New York since Pride’s Crossing in 1997, and it’s a gift to be back in Tina Howe world! 

Howe’s plays are great windows into the various stages of life. Young adulthood and its need for recognition shape Painting Churches, her 1983 breakout play about a 20-something artist and her desire for parental approval; Birth and After Birth looks at the strains of motherhood and Approaching Zanzibar deals with the challenges of mid-life, such as menopause and the approaching death of a family member.

In Chasing Manet, directed by Michael Wilson, Howe takes on the final stage, old age. Catherine Sargent (Jane Alexander, in photo right), a noted painter from a prominent Boston WASP family, and Rennie Waltzer, (Lynn Cohen, left), a bubbly Jewish woman with an adoring, involved family, end up sharing a room at the Mount Airy Nursing Home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Watching this unlikely pair evolve into a sisterhood of conspiracy is a treat. 

Rennie’s able to keep her cheery spirit because her confused mind allows her to have conversations with her dead husband as if he were in the room, and she doesn’t see herself in a nursing home -- she thinks she’s in the Mt. Airy Four Star Hotel. Upon arrival, when she hears the bing-bong bells that summon a nurse, she smiles happily and says, “Room service.” Catherine’s mind, on the other hand, is sharp and she resents her son, Royal (Jack Gilpin), for placing her in a nursing home, even though being legally blind she is unable to live alone. Unlike Rennie’s loving relationship with her family, Catherine’s with Royal, an English professor, is bitter. When, on one of his rare visits, Royal tells Rennie’s guests that he is writing a book about Yeats, Catherine says sarcastically, “Still?” 

In her all-powering desire to escape from the confines of the home, but with little vision to guide her, Catherine elicits Rennie’s help, even though Rennie needs a wheelchair. Catherine will push and Rennie will guide, a perfect plan only to the desperate, which Catherine is. She books them passage on the QE II and they plot their escape to Paris, “the blind leading the lame,” Catherine's spirit lightened with the thought of seeing Manet’s painting Dejeuner sur l’Herbe once again at the Louvre. (She has a copy hanging over her bed.) 

One of the funniest scenes has the two going through their considerable combined stock of medicines deciding what to take. Catherine can’t read the labels and Rennie, with her perpetual confusion, isn’t sure what anything is. Their deciding factor is how “serious” the pills sound when they shake the bottles. Then Rennie’s mind becomes momentarily crystal clear as she thinks about the one pill she must have. “Stool softener,” she says and both ladies rush for their night stands to grab their bottles. Together they shake them while gleefully singing a little song about there being no softener like stool softener to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” It’s hysterical, and a classic Howe moment. 

Alexander plays Catherine just right, capturing her haughtiness and anger, but allowing her free-spirited side to emerge naturally in time, and Cohen is the perfect foil. Julie Halston is hilarious as a senile patient with a salty tongue, a role she quickly, and frequently, exchanges for that of Rennie’s daughter. Rounding out the cast are Vanessa Aspillaga, David Margulies and Rob Riley. Tony Straiges’s sets, David C. Wollard’s costumes and Howell Binkley’s lighting work beautifully together to bring this world to life.

The delicious ending, which I won’t spoil for you, is pure Howe. She knows how to send her audiences out with their hearts high, which you know if you’ve seen The Art of Dining, Painting Churches and Approaching Zanzibar. When I interviewed Howe in 1990 for my second masters thesis, which was on her work, I asked her about her mastery of dynamic closings. They are a major focus of her work and, she said, usually surprise her as much as her audience. “The ending is everything to me,” she said. “To me the whole point of writing a play is to sculpt that shock, that visual shock. I think that’s my strongest suit in a way. Often the ending is what comes last, but I just know it has to be an epiphany. I do struggle long and hard to try to come up with something strong.” 

Well, Tina, you did it again. Thank you for another wonderful evening of theatre, and please don’t make us wait so long the next time. 

Chasing Manet, a Primary Stages production, runs through May 2 at 59E59 Theaters (located at 59 E. 59th St., between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets are available at the box office, by calling (212) 279-4200 and online at www.ticketcentral.com. For more information visit primarystages.com.

Tina Howe Still Shimmers

I wrote this feature for today's Theatermania.com.


Two hallmarks that have made Tina Howe such a beloved playwright, especially to women, are her humor and her shimmering endings. Both are onstage again in the first New York revival of Painting Churches, Howe’s 1983 breakthrough play about a family facing past resentments and a darkening future. This story of love and forgiveness, produced by the Keen Company, opens March 6 at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row under the direction of Carl Forsman.

The day before previews were to begin, Howe sat in the sunny living room of her Upper West Side apartment and talked about this most autobiographical, and vulnerable, of her works in which Mags, a young artist -- the Tina character (played by Kate Turnbull) -- returns to her parents gracious Boston townhouse determined to paint their portrait and finally win their approval. But Fanny and Gardner Church (Kathleen Chalfant and John Cunningham) have their own needs -- dealing with the decline in their lives as age and finances force them from their Brahmin world to a small cottage on Cape Cod. Set in the living room amid boxes in various stages of packing, old grievances give way to fresh understandings, with Howe’s zany sense of comedy lighting the way.

“The characters are very close to the household I grew up in, with echoes of the drama, the eccentricities, I heard constantly growing up,” she says.

Howe’s father was journalist Quincy Howe, who broadcast the evening news for years on CBS radio and moderated the final Kennedy/Nixon debate. One of her grandfathers and an uncle were Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, as is Gardner in the play.

“I grew up hearing the news in my father’s voice,” she said. “I knew what it felt like to grow up with a famous father.”

In Mags, she comes to terms with the feelings of inadequacy and need for attention that marked her early life. Reviewing the original production, New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote: “What Painting Churches has really revealed is the time and pain it costs us all to make that complete and honest parental portrait at last come into view.”

“It’s all true but none of it happened,” Howe says.

The play’s ending, though, is far removed from her parent’s leave-taking.

“The actual portrait, and the play, is a wish, a fantasy,” she says. “We all know life does not end that way. My parents’ ending was much more harrowing. I was painting a portrait of how we wish to see our parents at the end of life. That’s why audiences have loved it. It gives them a beautiful alternative, which I think is the function of theatre.

“I see Fanny and Gardner as tremendously brave and valiant. Fanny is aware Gardner is losing it but she soldiers on, creates an illusion that everything is all right. Their valor gets me. That’s very New England. They’re not into self-pity.”

She thinks of her endings as epiphanies.

“I believe in transformation. All my plays end in characters who are transformed and rise to a new level.”

Her plays also offer a decidedly female point of view, from The Nest, which deals with husband hunting, to Birth and After Birth’s portrayal of frazzled young motherhood, then menopause in Approaching Zanzibar and finally old age in Chasing Manet.

She is pleased that Painting Churches is one of three major revivals of the work of women playwrights this season, along with Margaret Edson’s Wit and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. For her, it’s still too few.

“Women’s work is still not at the top of artistic directors’ lists, yet we’re the ones buying the tickets.”

Painting Churches was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, losing to Glengarry Glen Ross. Pride’s Crossing, her play about the first woman to swim from English to France, also was a finalist in a year the Pulitzer committee chose not to offer an award for drama.

Next up, Howe is shopping around her latest work, which she will identify only as “apocalyptic play set on ocean liner,” and is working on a musical and a TV pilot, the details of which she declines to disclose. And she is passionate about developing new writers in her role as playwright in residence at Hunter College’s MFA program.

“I’m a hopeless optimist. It’s so easy to go to the dark side, weeping and tearing of flesh. It’s much harder to find grace. That’s always my goal.”

Tina Howe's new play, 'Singing Beach,' is a delight

   The deteriorating effects of climate change on the environment and the deteriorating effects of aging on the body are the subjects of Tina Howe’s new play, Singing Beach, which had its world premiere opening Sunday at HERE Mainstage in SoHo. In characteristic Howe fashion, these heavy topics are presented, and then transformed into a vision of hope.  I loved it.

     Under the direction of Ari Laura Kreith, the cast of seven glide easily from reality to fantasy in the July of a not-too-distant future in Manchester, MA. A family of four — parents Merrie (Erin Beirnard) and Owen (John P. Keller) and their children, 10-year-old Piper (Elodie Lucinda Morss) and 12-year-old Tyler (Jackson Demott Hill) — are faced with two decisions, whether to evacuate their beachside town as Hurricane Cassandra approaches with 150-mile-an-hour winds and whether to commit Merrie’s father, Ashton Sleeper (Tuck Milligan), to a nursing home now that a stroke has left him unable to care for himself. He had been a famous poet but now is without words.

     Piper is the focal point of the play and Morss portrays her to perfection.  This little girl must overcome the torments of her big brother, who annoyingly calls her Sniper instead of Piper, and her feelings of inadequacy.  “I’m just a narrow person in a quiet room,” she says, borrowing from the title of one of her mother’s successful novels. 

   But the life force is strong in Piper and she envisions a brighter world for herself and her grandfather that features escaping on a luxury liner and ice skating on the ocean in mid-July.  These flights of fancy are a hallmark of Howe’s plays, as are her shimmering endings.  

     Howe loves extravagance, which often makes staging her work challenging — and expensive.  The Broadway production of Coastal Disturbance, another seaside play, featured six tons of sand that had to be doused with 20 gallons of water before each performance.  It was a joy to walk into Circle in the Square on a cold winter night and have a beach experience, with the lighting conveying the warmth of a day at the seashore.

    That kind of staging is impossible for a small Off-Broadway company like Theatre 167 at HERE, but it doesn’t matter.  Scenic designer Jen Price Fick has created a multi-leveled stage of pale wood on which the beach, ship, sick room and everything else play out, with a minimum of props.  Matthew J. Fick’s lighting enhances the bleached out, colorless feeling of beachside quiet before the storm.  With the good script, good direction and good cast, which includes Naren Weiss and Devin Haqq, we have all we need for a transporting experience, with characters lying on the deck of an imaginary ship making angels in the imaginary July snow and skating without skates on an imaginary frozen ocean. 

   Piper reminded me of another of my favorite Tina Howe characters, Pony from 1989’s Approaching Zanzibar.  Pony also feels inferior in her family and must relate to an elderly character, her great aunt Olivia who is dying of cancer.  She’s fearful at first but she also has the imagination and high spirit to transform her world.  And both girls have their moment to fly, one of the many lovely visual treats Howe gives us in both plays.

     Another Howe play I was reminded of was Chasing Manet, her 2009 work that brought together two elderly women in a nursing home who plot their escape to Paris on the QEII.  

     And I thought of Painting Churches, Howe’s breakout play from 1983, in which an elderly couple must sell their large Boston townhouse for a move to a cottage on Cape Cod.  Gardner Church had been a famous writer, just as Ashton Sleeper in Singing Beach was, but dementia and incontinence leave him as a mere remembrance of his old self.  Both plays present painful scenes of going though a lifetime of belongs with the task of deciding what to take and what to give away. These are sad experiences, ones that I went through with my mother.  I never leave a Tina Howe play sad, though.  I leave with a sense of joy because of her playful plot twists and those resurrection endings she creates.

     When I first interviewed her, in 1990 for my second Master’s thesis that was on her work, I asked her about her mastery of dynamic closings. They are a major focus of her work and, she said, usually surprise her as much as her audiences.

     “The ending is everything to me,” she said. “To me the whole point of writing a play is to sculpt that shock, that visual shock. I think that’s my strongest suit in a way. Often the ending is what comes last, but I just know it has to be an epiphany. I do struggle long and hard to try to come up with something strong.”

     She has done it again.  You will be won over by Piper and the delicious world she creates, the one created for her by Tina Howe, a playwright of epiphanies. 

Tina Howe

I am so excited that Tina Howe will have a new play premiering next year. I’ve interviewed her several times, did my second master's thesis on her and her work and taught her plays one summer at Brooklyn College. It’s been a long time since she’s had a new work on stage here in New York, not since “Pride’s Crossing” in the late 90s. Last season we were lucky to have “Birth and Afterbirth,” a very old play that I had read but never seen because it had never been staged in New York. Now a whole new play. It’s about time!

I have so much respect for Tina as a writer and a person. She is down-to-earth and accessible, and her plays are SO funny, and moving at the same time. I’m really looking forward to “Chasing Manet,” which will star Jane Alexander, a friend of Tina’s since their college days. Primary Stages describes the play this way: "A rebellious painter from a distinguished family in Boston and an ebullient Jewish woman with a huge, adoring family form an unlikely bond. Inside the confining walls of Mount Airy Nursing Home, the two plot an escape to Paris aboard the QE2. But can they possibly pull it off amidst the chaos of their surroundings? The tension and comedy grow as they struggle to take wing for the last time."

That’s interesting considering Tina and Jane spent a year together in Paris after they graduated from college. It was there Tina fell in love with the absurdist plays of Samuel Beckett, which would go on to influence much of her work.

The way I happened to teach her plays came from some advice from another professor at Brooklyn College. I was going to be teaching the dreaded required course in research paper writing. I was told to mold the course around something that interested me and so I chose theatre, with the emphasis being on Tina Howe’s plays. The students had never heard of Tina and some had never even read or seen a play. Tina, as you might know, is a WASP who writes about that world; the students were mostly immigrants and minorities. Not only were plays foreign to them, so was the subject matter of the ones they would be reading all summer.

It turned out, though, to be a perfect fit. A common theme in Tina’s plays is failure to communicate, with characters talking at cross purposes and growing increasingly frustrated at not being listened to. My students could understand that. They “got it” right away. We used Coastal Disturbances, the anthology that included that play as well as “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches.” I never had any trouble getting them to volunteer to read out loud in class, taking the parts of characters whose lives on the surface were so different from theirs. I loved listening to them, the Russian, Dominican, Polish and other assorted accents melding together into a wonderful -- transformational -- experience of theatre. I arranged for them to see an off, off-Broadway production of “Museum,” so some had their first experience of live theatre. Tina lent me her copy of the PBS recording of “Painting Churches,” the play that put her on my radar screen when I saw it at Baltimore’s CENTERSTAGE in the mid-80s, and we watched that together over two classes.

To put Tina’s plays in context, I also had them read the Arts & Leisure section of the NYT each week (and taught them how to look for the Ninas in the Hirschfeld drawings). When they read an article about Beckett one week and learned that he was an absurdist, they said: “Like Tina.” I told that to Tina and she laughed. Beckett was her inspiration, but to them he was like Tina. She had become their point of reference for all theatre.

It had been a long, hot summer in an unair conditioned classroom on the top floor under the roof -- extra hot -- and they actually did have to write a research paper, and I had to teach that dry stuff, but they were so involved in the subject matter they didn’t mind. They made intelligent comments and comparisons of Tina’s plays. I told them they were now Tina Howe scholars, that not many people knew as much about her as they did. They seemed really proud about being scholars of something.

On the last day of class they told me how much they loved the course and how much they had been dreading it beforehand. I confessed I felt the same way. It turned out to be a good summer, and the most enjoyable teaching experience I ever had. All because of that little bit of advice, to choose something I liked.

I definitely do like Tina Howe plays, and I look forward to this new one.