The portrait that gives Tina Howe's play "Painting Churches" its name exists both on canvas and in the lovingly sketched portrayals of its three characters: an aging couple preparing to leave the Boston townhouse they've lived in for decades and the daughter who comes home to help them pack up.
"Painting Churches" honors and analyzes its subjects, much the way the best paintings do, and Silver Spring Stage has mounted an exquisite production of this story, finding resonant drama, poignant revelations and hearty, life-inspired laughs in a captivating collage of clashing emotional needs.
Jo Klein-Duke and Craig Miller portray a daughter and father coming to grips with the aging process in Silver Spring Stage's poignant "Painting Churches." Tina Howe's play was nominated for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
(Neil Edgell)
|
|
The play was an off-Broadway hit for Howe two decades ago, catapulting her into the top ranks of contemporary playwrights. It's semi-autobiographical, based on her parents, notably her father, Quincy Howe, a CBS commentator during the golden age of radio. Tina Howe inherited his love of words, crafting luxurious wordplay in the poetry recited by Gardner Church (Craig Miller), an aging Pulitzer Prize-winning poet slowly losing his mental abilities, and in the sometimes sharply toned conversations between mother and daughter.
The mother, Fanny (Millie Ferrara), is a slightly eccentric, tart-tongued Boston Brahmin who loves her doddering husband but fears and resents the loss of their cultured life. Daughter Margaret (Jo Klein-Duke) had long ago fled to New York and a career as a painter. An infrequent visitor home, she wants to paint a definitive portrait of her parents while she has the chance; the work also allows her an opportunity to get a good look at them, to use the artist's objectivity with her subjects to see them as people and not just her parents.
The view is not always a pretty one. Her gentle father, once a giant in his field, is now diminished, shuffling and forgetful. Mom is becoming slightly undone, her eccentricities more pronounced under the dual pressures of thinning income and mounting care requirements for her husband.
Director Barry Hoffman must love this play. He seems to have taken great care to ensure that just the right tone is struck to create the sense of real lives unfolding. There are moments of dialogue that border on melodrama, particularly Fanny's fulminations, that in the hands of a less skillful actor and director could be strident or might lose the sense of humanity if they just went after laughs. But Ferrara never goes over the top, slightly underplaying some scenes just enough to make the audience laugh with her, not at her, and to make the humor spring from character, not from punch lines.
Ferrara is a wonder onstage. Using a brittle New England voice reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn's and with a million-watt smile, she can go from dotty and warm to cold and lacerating instantaneously and make it seem natural. Miller revels in words, the age and cobwebs melting off his frail Gardner whenever he begins to recite a beloved poem. He allows us to see Gardner's former self flickering just beneath the surface, the flame breaking through occasionally, especially when he wishes to charm his wife.
Together, Ferrara and Miller give full dimension to their characters' world, which seems to be flattening out -- everything from the taste of saltine crackers to the burgeoning artistic success of their daughter in New York's art world seems of equal import. Klein-Duke has the difficult role of being a catalyst who prods her parents into revealing themselves, often retreating behind the artist's eye as she does so, the detachment protecting her from old hurts.
The gentle ambiance of reality is supported by Andrew S. Greanleaf's evocative Beacon Hill home interior, a faded but still elegant frame for this portrait of two faded but elegant people.
"Painting Churches" continues through March 19 at Silver Spring Stage, 10145 Colesville Rd., in the Woodmoor Shopping Center. Showtime is 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. For reservations, call 301-593-6036. For information and reservations, visit www.ssstage.org.
