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"Moments" the Fade, Love that Abides in Tina Howe's Painting Churches
American Drama, Summer 2007 by Loomis, Jeffrey
As if pondering life's general fallenness, Woolf further studies fluctuating moments (and other temporal units) in her other mid-1920s novel ??p. Dalloway. Here party-giver Clarissa Dalloway meditates about fading moments of festive serenity. Readers, meanwhile, are led to observe far more devastating encounters with moments that are shredding apart as they regard the schizophrenic (and eventually suicidal) mind of the shellshocked, ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith. Howe, likewise, at one point reveals how Gardner Church, even as he appears to be developing Alzheimer's disease himself, is stunned when realizing that almost all his old Bostonian friends are besieged by an Addison's, or a Hodgkins', or a Parkinson's ailment (Painting Churches }a\ Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 147-148). Even harsher is Gardner's nightmare of strangers invading his family home and occupying - or, what is worse, hauling away [!} - the family furniture, including his own bed (Painting Churches 60-61; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 167-168)!
As someone clearly on his way to thudding encounters with personal mortality (as an evident early-stage sufferer from Alzheimer's disease), Gardner Church appears most to echo the dazedness of Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay at the fading of her party's splendid moments. For example, Gardner bewails that he "can't hold on to anything around here" (Painting Churches 23; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 141). Indeed, this contention seems proven as we observe his repeated dropping of papers or his coat onto the floor (Painting Churches 11, 32; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 132, 147), his inability to find ice for cocktails (Painting Churches 49; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 159), and his clumsy crashing of his body against a table (Painting Churches 27; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 14.3). Howe also shows Gardner's wife Fanny to have moments of bad memory. She forgets, when she finds Gardner missing from the house, that he had announced his plans to go out for a while (Painting Churches ,31; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 146), and she also is unable to pinpoint the exact diseases from which most of her elderly friends suffer (Painting Churches 33; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 147).
Howe also, quite amusingly, has even young Mags recollect that she had recently, on three successive days, forgotten to do something important. After neglecting to keep appointments one day, the next day Mags forgets to set her alarm (or at least managed to oversleep), and, on a third day, she forgets to wear undergarments (Painting Churches 18; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 137). Later, too, Mags cannot correctly bring back to her mind the words of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," a poem that her father, paradoxically and as it to add to her human embarrassment, is teaching his pet bird Toots to memorize and recite (Painting Churches 75-76; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 179)ยท Therefore, the loss of firmly controlled memory-banks in the brain, even to the point of Alzheimerian dementia, is not, in Painting Churches, merely functioning as a realistic motif of couleur locale, of contemporary life detail. Perhaps more importantly, it works as a metaphor for the inevitable habit of all vivid moments to fade into broader (and muddier) realms of life process .
