Singing the Brahmin Blues

By T.E.Kalem

PAINTING CHURCHES by Tina Howe

This is a radiant, loving and zestfully humorous play about subjects that darken the mind with icy forebodings. It concerns growing old and getting senile, leaving a spacious ancestral home and entering the anteroom of death.

It also concerns the generation gulf, the estrangement and reconciliation of a daughter and her parents. In a family, each member exists in the eye of the beholder. Since each person's vision differs, the illusions of a lifetime may be stripped away in bruising and bracing moments of revelation. Isn't this precisely what one expects a fine portrait painter to do?

The artist in question is Mags (short for Margaret) Church. She lives in Manhattan and is about to have a one-woman show at a 57th Street gallery. With pride and belated affection, she visits her patrician parents on Boston's Beacon Hill. The house, which has been sold, greets Mags like a bare, ruined choir of lamentation. The great vaulting windows are naked, the marble fireplace mantelpiece is shrouded, and the living room floor is scattered with empty packing cartons. In the direst exodus of their lives, Fanny (Marian Seldes) and Gardner Church (Donald Moffat) are retreating, year-round, to their summer cottage on Cape Cod. There, as Fanny puts it, with caustic self-pity, there will be "nothing but the gulls, the oysters and us."

Mags intends to do their portrait, but the Churches paint it for us first. Gardner has been a renowned poet, the confrere of Yeats and Frost, whom he tellingly quotes. Now he is, in Fanny's words, "very gaga" and "deaf as an adder." He repeats questions that he has asked and answers questions that have not been asked. He guards his latest incoherent manuscript like a toothless lion and then flings it through the air Like a sheaf of errant snowflakes.

As for Fanny, she seems initially Like a snobbish and slightly silly guardian of the Brahmins' unalterable law of proprieties. But as the play progresses, she begins to reveal a zany comic sense and something more: the courage to carry out the marriage vows in adversity. Frances Conroy's Mags is quite touching as she seeks a parental benison on her vocation. None of the performances could be bettered. Seldes and Moffat may never have given more emotionally charged and exquisitely crafted performances in their long-spanned careers.

After Museum and The Art of Dining, Tina Howe continues to learn, and to grow as a playwright. In Painting Churches, at off-Broadway's Second Stage theater, the tone, if not the maturity, is distinctly Chekhovian. Howe captures the same edgy surface of false hilarity, the same unutterable sadness beneath it, and the indomitable valor beneath both.

--By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.