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"Moments" the Fade, Love that Abides in Tina Howe's Painting Churches
American Drama, Summer 2007 by Loomis, Jeffrey
Just as much as other Tina Howe plays, Painting Churches, from beginning to end, echoes the themes of a novelist Virginia Woolf, of whom Howe has long declared herself an admirer (Barlow 171). In fact, in Painting Churches, Howe expands Woolfian themes considerably by making Woolfian metaphor clusters out of apparently realistic details. She thus broadens our sense of how omnipresent to humanity is a concern, such as that which Woolf voices, about the scary flux of human experience. For instance, Howe turns into symbols of flux the lighting effects within Impressionist painting and the traumatic onsets, for human beings, of decayed bodily health - especially (through such conditions as Alzheimer's disease) the degeneration of human memory functions. In the end, though, the play's great central theme is not degeneration but, rather, endurance. These Churches paint, for readers, the lasting power of love.
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Although Virginia Woolf and Tina Howe both pay much attention to death, which marks the ultimate dissolution of radiant consciousness, their work also regularly enshrines moments of especially sparkling life. Both writers extol the most dazzling of living perceptions, knowing, however, how such experiential glories must inevitably dissolve - mixing into muddier streams of still-living, yet already dying consciousness. At heart, Woolf and Howe concentrate intensely on both the potential bliss and the definite brevity of any "present moment" (Woolf "The Moment: Summer's Night" 3).
For example, in Woolf's British lyrical narrative To the Lighthouse, the character Mrs. Ramsay rejoices when she achieves, at a dinner party, a beautifully coherent moment of calm serenity:
Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily __ (146147; emphasis mine)
Unfortunately, however, the same vital woman must admit, as her precious festal event concludes later that evening, that, even in her protected dining room,
[i]t was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and chen, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (167-168)
In an odd but definite variation upon the worries over flux voiced by Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, Howe's dowager character Fanny Church, in Painting Churches, cannot easily comprehend why her daughter Mags, a Pratt Institute art instructor, would want to attempt to sketch her parents for an oil portrait at the very time while they are "trying to move" (Painting Churches 21; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 139)ยท Even as Fanny seems to talk here only of the elder Churches' packing of boxes and crates, so that they may relocate from Boston's Beacon Hill house to a beach cottage in Cotuit, sensitivity to Howe's word-play extends our interpretation of her lines beyond that "moving day" reference. Gardner and Fanny, in truth, can claim secure residence now (and for yet some days) in their familiar Beacon Hill setting. But their constant human "move[ment]," even within this long-lived-in home, already breaks up the fragile coherence of their moments there. In this play's plot, both Church parents prove decisively anxious in their movements. Almost incorrigibly resistant to Mags's attempts at controlling them, they turn prankish, frisky, even naughty - and thus refuse any kind of static pose before Mags's painter's easel (Painting Churches 28; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays Mi).
Another poignant segment of Painting Churches reminds us, in its language of wistful regret for the necessary passing of especially dazzling moments, very much of Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay's inner sigh when her dinner party is forced, in the waning evening hours, to end. Here Mags and her father Gardner recall occasions when they sometimes swam in ocean waters that were alit with "silver-green sparks" of phosphorus. Each of them had looked, for a time, as if "turning into a saint or something," "wishing the moment would hold forever." Yet they humanly "knew it would pass, [that] it was passing already" and that "[they]'d never be like that again" (Painting Churches 77-78; Coastal Disturbances: Pour PLt)S 180-181). Even while this scene looked wondrous, Gardner and Mags sensed it to be caused by "Chemicals, chemicals," "chemical waste" (Painting Churches 78; Coastal Disturbances: Pour Pins 180). Re-enforcing this sensed imperfection, Gardner rued that the phosphorus "stained all the towels a strange yellowgreen" (Painting Churches 78; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 180). Like several famed modern poetic passages that Gardner briefly recites within the contours of the play (Painting Churches 51; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 161), the phosphorus seems product and symbol of a world that looks fallen away from any chance of fully recovered perfection - even though some of that world's local fruits, as one of the quoted poems says, look quite "impeccable" (qtd. in Howe Painting Churches 51; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 161).
