Painting Churches is a play written by Tina Howe, first produced Off-Broadway in 1983. It was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play concerns the relationship between an artist daughter and her aging parents.
Background
The play grew from Howe's particular and enduring experience of art. Howe said: "Now... I'm enthralled with the French Impressionists." One theme of the play is an artist's coming of age. Howe: "How does a child get his parents to accept him not as a child, but as an artist?... There is an odyssey every child has to face in order to find his legs in his own household... The play is also about the departure of a vanishing breed..."
Plot
In a townhouse in the Beacon Hill area of Boston, an elderly couple, Fanny and Gardner Church, are packing. They are moving to a beach home on Cape Cod. Gardner is a poet and Fanny is from a "fine old family." Their daughter Margaret, an artist who lives in New York, has arrived to help them pack and paint their portrait. Over the course of several days, Mags sees her role in the parent-child relationship changing. Gardner is having memory problems and has become frail, and in his frustration, recites the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, among others. Mags finishes the portrait of her parents, in the style of Renoir. Her parents are able to see her talent, and enjoy being in a "Renoir" party as they dance a waltz.
wrote in his review of the 1983 original production in The New York Times: " 'Painting Churches,' which opens the Second Stage's season at its temporary new home on Theater Row, is in the dreamiest impressionistic spirit. It remakes reality with delicate, well-chosen brush strokes, finding beauty and truth in the abstract dance of light on a familiar landscape... It's a high compliment to Miss Howe... that the old bones of her material rarely peek through her writing's high, lacy gloss." The Variety reviewer wrote of the 2012 revival: "Howe has written poignant solo moments for each of her fondly observed characters... 'Painting Churches' is still a stunner, a group portrait painted in a soft, impressionistic style. But the shimmering lights of this visual poem have been dimmed in this too-too production — too solid, too specific, too literal, too loud, and too bright." The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote of the television film that there were "knockout performances by Sada Thompson and Donald Moffat". He praised the production "Then there is the captivating rhythm established by writer Tina Howe and director Jack O'Brien, who skillfully wend their way in and out of various moods without signaling where they're going next." Alvin Klein, reviewing the 1986 Hartman Theatre production for The New York Times wrote: "As the curtain falls...Fanny and Gardner Church, an elderly couple, begin a life-affirming waltz... the playwright's lyric and literate words and genuine feeling have peered through a pedestian production."
