Tolstoy’s famous quote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” likely applies double to families of artists. Actually, both happy and unhappy parts tend to be exacerbated by artistic temperaments known for remarkable sensitivity, passion … but also selfishness.
Playwright Tina Howe’s prolific four decades won numerous awards, including a Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama. Still she’s far from a household name. As the granddaughter of an actual Pulitzer winner in Biography, Howe grew up in prestigious and active literary and artistic circles. To her credit, she writes about what she knows – people playing with artists and writers, quirky characters seeped in the “Experimental and Absurdist traditions.” When inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, long-time friend, actress Jane Alexander, praised Howe’s passion, wit, and absurdity. She called her plays “a deep dive into the depth,” adding, “She writes as no one else does about women.”
Tina Howe’s 1983-84 Off-Broadway hit, PAINTING CHURCHES, is a prime example of her unique voice. I’d especially like to thank Pigs Do Fly Productions’ founder/executive producer Ellen Wacher and director Deborah Kondelik for bringing this play to Empire Stage – their regular home base and the ideal, intimate venue for getting personally involved in the Church family drama. (This would be the time to clarify that “Church” is simply the family’s surname and “painting” refers to their visiting artist daughter’s mission to paint a portrait of her mom and dad.) Of course, in a broader sense, “painting” can also be seen figuratively as an artistic representation of Church family dynamics.
What mostly drew me (no pun intended) to this play, however, was its cast – popular South Florida A-listers who always impress me with their virtuosity. I trusted Pigs Do Fly to make good play choices, and director Kondelik’s casting expertise. But I also respected the actors’ choice to participate and was curious to see their take on the play’s three featured roles. I’ll say up front that I was inordinately impressed by each actor’s finely nuanced and sophisticated rendition of their particular, challenging member of this maddening family.
Let’s start with superstar, super-busy Carbonell- and multi-award winning Laura Turnbull who opened the play as Fanny, a self-involved flamboyant aesthete. The Time is Spring 1980 and Fanny enters wearing an outrageously ornate hat and bathrobe. She’s surrounded by cardboard boxes and items tagged for auction. While packing silver serving ware into a box labeled Parke Bernet Gallery 5, she keeps stopping to admire her reflection in a shiny tray. She then repeatedly calls out to her husband, Gardner (William Mahone), to come see her latest millinery find. But he’s too busy typing (we hear the constant clacking of a typewriter next door).
for their daughter’s portrait. Photo by Carol Kassie.
Gardner is not only hard of hearing, he’s also forgetful, and suffers from encroaching old-age symptoms of incontinence and dementia. As a blue blood, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, he’d been able to support the family in their fancy Beacon Hill, Boston home for decades. But with his depleting mental capacities (he’d given up writing poetry for a magnum opus critique of all the great poets) and strained finances, they are now forced to sell the family home and most of their valuable belongings – downsizing to live full time in their small summer cottage on Cape Cod.
When his voluminous, unnumbered reams of typed sheets are scattered about the floor (revealing only small, oft-repeated sections of a few famous stanzas) coupled with Gardner’s inability to recall what’s just been said, we quickly realize his incessant typing and megalomaniac ambition will come to naught. But this sort of fixation on a detailed work project is a common dementia trait. Where Gardner does shine, however, is in his perfectly intact memory for great lines of poetry and literature. He frequently breaks out in dramatic recitations of famous works by master poets like Yeats, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. The poetry lover in me could listen to William Mahone (as Gardner) recite poetry for hours, irrespective of anything else. But don’t worry, these are but lovely interludes and the Church family drama shortly intervenes.
Gardner’s wife, Fanny, intervenes most of all. Starting with her insistence that he notice her new hat and teasing him into guessing the cost, claiming its designer label would fetch $50 minimum. She lets him guess higher and higher numbers, then gleefully announces the hat was a thrift shop find that she snatched up for a mere 85 cents! Designer conscious Fanny now finds her days filled with roaming thrift shops and despite being frustrated and even angry at her husband’s failing faculties (resenting how all practical matters concerning the move now lie on her shoulders), she nevertheless continues to seek his involvement and approval. All he can now offer is an almost childlike devotion. At least when she hasn’t provoked him into an angry fit by dumping his precious books and papers and thus “messing up” his office system. It does need to be cleared out in two days. Just maybe in a more considerate fashion?
Put-upon Fanny has the play’s most lines; she’s always fiercely commenting, wistfully remembering or complaining about something. But we also observe her genuine love and need for her husband despite everything (what’s nowadays criticized as “co-dependence” used to be called a long marriage). And while maybe not to her privileged degree, we can all sympathize with the emotional stress caused by the need to downsize and give up family heirlooms, artwork, autographed books – each item cloaked in a story from one’s past. So we find ourselves cheering when Fanny decides to keep Grandma’s set of silver teaspoons, despite an earlier offer of $50,000 from “a distinguished man” from the American Wing of the Museum of Art.
Fanny and Gardner keep checking the window, anticipating the arrival of their daughter Margaret, known as “Mags” (Ana Marie Calise) who’s several hours late and is coming to help them pack.
When Mags finally shows up – out of breath and toting loads of bags, having walked from the station as there was no taxi in sight – her mom’s first reaction is to criticize her dyed “red” hair (though I found the supposed streaks barely noticeable). But Mags notices, and pushes back at Fanny’s first response to seeing her in over a year as criticism about her looks. Fanny also keeps complaining about Mags’ shabby dress style, saying she’ll never snag a husband by “walking around like something the cat dragged in.” And so we are instantly made aware of a conflicted mother-daughter dynamic – both personally and generationally. (Note to self: Next time my grown daughter arrives for a visit and I hate her shocking red hair color, don’t say a thing; she’s actually complained about my disapproving “hellos” several times in the past.)
Mags seems to be more sympathetic toward her often clueless dad, and berates her mom for the demeaning way she addresses him. In her defense, Fanny tells Mags she hasn’t been around to suffer through life with her difficult dad of late and we, at least I, can see her occasional nastiness as a defense mechanism for personal survival. Meanwhile, Gardner doesn’t appear to notice, still grateful to bask in their shared moments of recollection and warmth.
While unpacking an easel stand, Mags can’t wait to tell her big news. “I am being given a one-woman show at one the most important galleries in New York. It’s a miracle!” she exclaims. Mags has been an artist, albeit unrecognized by the family, since she was a child, then specialized in out-of-style portraiture. The art form appears to be making a comeback with gallerists suddenly blown away by her work. She’s brought easel and canvas because, in addition to helping with the clear-out, she wants to paint a portrait of her parents to include in her upcoming show.
Her parents congratulate her but quickly return to personal concerns. Fanny shows off her crafty “magic lantern” style lampshade, to high approbation from her daughter, but then goes back to lamenting their financial situation and what’s happening with the few friends who are still with them but suffering from various illnesses – Hodgkin’s, Addison, Parkinson’s – they can’t keep who’s got what straight. Yes, this is elderly gallows humor, as are Gardner’s frequent short-term memory lapses and confusions. But we are allowed to laugh, even while teary-eyed.
Kondelik explains how “the play explores the shifting tides of relationships between parents and their adult children, all while subtly examining the process of memory, change, and the inevitable passage of time. In ‘Painting Churches’ Howe captures the bittersweetness of life – how we struggle with the past while simultaneously grappling with the responsibility of the present. The play gives us moments of levity amidst its emotional depths – finding laughter in the confusion, in the mismatched recollections, and in the sometimes outrageous behaviors of its characters. Howe reminds us that even in the face of loss or impending change, there is room for wit and tenderness.”
And always ART. Once her parents warm up to the idea of sitting for their portrait (though the actual “sitting still” part proves more challenging than expected) they join in a delightful comedy routine of posing as classical art subjects – from finding a three pronged fork to emulate the raised pitchfork in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” taking a lap pose as Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” to lying prone on the floor and touching index fingers a la “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Act I ends with a harrowing dramatic reveal by Mags where sitting up close (with only a few stadium tiered rows, we all do) is a major perk. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Ana Marie Calise’s glittery eyes of pain that became true tears at her agonized recollection of criminal childhood neglect, her passion whilst creating an original, secret artistic “masterpiece” after being banished from the dinner table for six months at age nine, and her devastation at her artwork’s discovery and its careless destruction. I must say if ever there were an argument against self-involved artists (who don’t hire caring nannies) having children, this is it. See the play, then let me know if you agree.
Beautiful recordings of Chopin piano pieces, which sound live, open the show and continue to entertain us during scene changes that sometimes take a couple of minutes. Production stage manager Larry Buzzeo keeps everything moving smoothly and it’s fun to watch his bandanna-hair-wrapped assistant stage manager Om Jae expertly cart off and return boxes, papers, furnishings … even sharing an impish grin as he crunches on a cracker from the saltine box or salutes us before imbibing a leftover drink.
compiling a major poetry review fly away by turning a manuscript page into a paper
airplane. Photo by Carol Kassie.
