As artists from Rembrandt to Picasso know, the art of portraiture is both elusive and paradoxical. A good portrait reveals such a rich world of details-personality, class, attitudes, era-that the more accurate it is, the more likely it is to offend the sitter. Portraits are always a two-way mirror: It's not just their subjects who are reflected, but the artist who paints them.
In Tina Howe's "Painting Churches", now playing at Ensemble Theatre, the theatrical portrait is the complex relationship between aging parents and their artist daughter, an impressionistic collage of competing needs and emotional demands. Margaret Church, on the brink of a prestigious New York gallery show, comes home to Boston to help her aging parents move from their Beacon Hill home to their Cape Cod cottage. She has her own agenda: between the packing, she wants to paint their portrait to include in her show.
But Margaret is ill-prepared for the turmoil she finds. Gardner, her gentle Pulitzer Prize-winning poet father, has been inexorably losing his bearings to what looks like Alzheimer's. Her mother Fanny, abrasive and narcissistic even under normal circumstances, is half-cracked from caregiver stress. Margaret's desire unleashes an endless series of negotiations and mutual attempts to control. It's both gift and expose': an eager-to-please daughter's celebration of her parents, and an artist's ruthless examination of her roots.
Some of the subtleties of Howe's play are lost in Licia Colombi's overheated production. The broad strokes are there, but Colombi and her cast don't always get the details right. Howe isn't a theatrical realist; her vision is always surreally off-center, including a parakeet that can recite "Gray's Elegy". For her over-the-top speeches to work, actors have to underplay them. At Ensemble, too often the antagonists are at full boil, fulminating with made-for-TV recriminations.
Glenn Colerider is the most successful at getting the tone right. He's credible as a slightly daffy Boston Brahmin father, and his poetic recitations and distracted shuffling are endearing and moving. As Margaret, the angular Pandora Robertson looks like an artist, and manages a mean charcoal sketch. She is best in moments of stillness when her feelings wash over her mobile face, but too often she is loud and shrill. Mary Jane Nottage's performance as Fanny is brimming with so many forced eccentricities, from hooting laugh to glazed smile, that it's hard to watch. The unevenness of the trio, who are nearly always on stage together, puts Howe's chamber piece at a disadvantage.
But even with its flaws, "Painting Churches" has moments of lovely clarity. Rob Wolin's spare set with framing window and Laura MacLaughlin's lights create painterly effects, especially in the play's beautiful opening and closing images. That's when we recognize and honor an artist's paradoxical attempt to celebrate and dissect, reveal yet dignify her fragile, human subjects.
Originally published in the Plain Dealer.