Painting Churches,
Tina Howe's play about an eccentric family of three and the
images they present—to the world (as they perceive it) and to each
other—is not quite as striking in its current Keen Company revival as it was upon its off- Broadway debut in
1983 This doesn't appear to be the fault of director Carl Forsman's altogether competent production, but more the play's seeming much
more a thing of its era than anyone might have suspected. Funny how that can
happen, especially when there's nothing particularly in the text that has overt
dependence upon the present day of its creation. But what couldn't be accounted
for was the state of a future Zeitgeist, that would give its dramatic premise a
new, retroactive context.
The
title is a play on words: The family are the Churches; the elderly parents are
Fanny (Kathleen Chalfant) and
her renowned poet husband Gardner (John Cunningham); and daughter Margaret (Kate Turnbull) has returned home after a long absence—and
several major breakthroughs in her career as a portraitist—to capture
their essence on canvas. The problem is, as familiar as they are with each
other’s behaviors and tics, those behaviors and tics make them enigmas to each
other as well, so “essence” is, to put it mildly, an elusive quality. And added
to this is the realization that Gardner has passed beyond eccentricity and
through senility to a condition that the play doesn’t name, but is causing him
to slowly unravel. It is eventually recognized by us in the audience as
Alzheimer’s, yet it is not recognized in the play as such, because Ms. Howe
doesn’t dramatize mother and daughter as if they even know what it is. There’s
a big confrontation between them in which the daughter, having had no idea what
was going on, wonders how mother can just treat father like a child; and mother
blasts back that daughter can’t just disappear for a year at a time and then
just drop in to pass judgment without knowing how, in fact, mother has been
holding father together. In 1983, when Ms. Howe’s play debuted, Alzheimer’s was
just entering the landscape as a “disease trademark,” if you will. (It had been
identified early in the century but not acknowledged by the scientific
community as a common malady until 1977.) So it was easier to simply go with
the flow of an eccentric father on the decline as an aspect of coming to grips
with the age of a loved one.
But
Gardner’s decline is peppered with not only memory loss, but dementia and hints
of other more serious indicia, that should, perhaps, suggest even more serious
symptomology; so the response of the Church women seems not quite appropriate
somehow. It conjures, oddly, the notion of watching Ibsen’s Ghosts and trying, with a 2012 head, to buy into the 1881
notion of inherited syphilis. Everything about it is a hair or two off; nor
does the, at first, very over-written dramatization of how the crazy family
members keep missing each other's signals, help matters, because along with the
rest, it keeps you from suspending disbelief as much as you’d like.
The
performances of old pros Chalfant and Cunningham as the parents are lovely in
that cherished way of old pros; Ms.
Turnbull alternates between grounded and hysterical without sufficient
transitional tissue to blend the two states convincingly. But she’s an able
performer, so I wonder if that’s not at least partially a flaw of direction (or direction
neglected).
In
any event, it all adds up to a play that’s become an eccentric curiosity, where
something that landed as poetic and delicate once stood.
Sometimes
a little knowledge can be a
dangerous thing…
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page