Tina Howe, who focused on the humor, sadness and solidity of the lives of her characters, especially the female ones, in plays that could be extravagant productions or small-cast gems, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her family said the cause was complications from a broken hip she recently suffered.
Ms. Howe was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama, for “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. Her “Coastal Disturbances” ran for 350 Broadway performances in 1987 and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.
In the foreword to a 1984 collection of her plays, “Museum,” “The Art of Dining,” and “Painting Churches,” she described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of her work:
“They share an immersion in making and consuming art, a fascination with food, a tendency to drift towards the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless infatuation with the sight gag.”
Her plays generally also have another characteristic in common: they feature multidimensional female characters of a type not often seen when she started out in the 1970s. As she told an interviewer on the CUNY TV show “Women in Theater” in 2004, many artistic directors in those years were men who were only interested in plays that victimized female characters. It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that focused on “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”
Some of her plays were sprawling creations, such as “Museum,” which was set in the gallery of a major art museum and had a cast of nearly 50 when it premiered at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater in 1976. “Coastal Disturbances,” as Mrs. Howe described it in the foreword to a 1989 collection, is set on “a beach complete with surging ocean and 20 tons of sand.”
“I seem to go out of my way to make it as hard as possible to put them on,” she wrote of those kinds of plays.
But she also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took her career to a new level when it premiered at Manhattan’s Second Stage in 1983. The play contains only three characters: a married couple and their artist. daughter, who paints the portrait of her parents as the play progresses, revealing truths about the family as she completes the task. Mrs. Howe described it as a kind of inverted image of ‘Museum’, in which characters talk about art; in ‘Painting Churches’ the characters become art.
Frank Rich, reviewing the production in DailyExpertNews, quoted a line the father spoke late in the play.
‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he says, in a line of art criticism which may also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s wonderful play,’ wrote Mr. Rich.
After the Second Stage performance, the production moved to another Midtown theater and continued for months.
“Coastal Disturbances” also opened at Second Stage, in 1986, and it also drew critical acclaim. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathering on a beach, though this is just the premise.
“It was really about the pain of love and the pain of love and the excitement and the heartbreak and the joy,” said Annette Bening, who played the central role, a photographer named Holly who is in a relationship with a lifeguard, in a phone conversation. interview.
Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, she said, was a thinly disguised version of Mrs. Howe herself, which meant that she and Mrs. Howe developed a bond.
“She was incredibly astute and extremely intelligent,” said Ms Bening, “and her plays reflected all of that.”
Mr. Rich, in his review of ‘Coastal Disturbances’, called it ‘obviously the creation of a feminine sensibility, but the beautiful, isolated private beach generously illuminates the intimate landscape shared by women and men.’
“Coastal Disturbances” showcased Ms. Howe’s sense of absurdity. In one scene, Mrs. Bening was buried neck-deep in sand by the lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) as she recounted a slightly erotic fantasy about anthropomorphic dolphins.
In the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Mrs. Howe explained her penchant for goofy scenes.
“I came of age during the heyday of absurdism, when it was the boys who shook up the perception of what was stageworthy – Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” she wrote. “Their artistry and daring were thrilling as they scrambled logic and language, but where were their female counterparts, shaking up for us what was stage-worthy for us? Since I was a hopelessly ignorant feminist with no axe, who better to rise to the challenge than me?”
Mabel Davis Howe was born on November 21, 1937 in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina since childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, said her son, Eben Levy.) Her father, an author, journalist and commentator, worked for CBS radio and ABC television. Her mother was an amateur artist who exhibited on Long Island.
Marx Brothers films were among Mrs. Howe’s childhood passions and influenced her playwriting.
“The whole point was to keep piling the superfluous on the superfluous,” she wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theatre?”
While attending Sarah Lawrence College, actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Mrs. Howe’s first plays, ‘Closing Time’. Mrs. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.
“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing ‘The Bald Soprano’ by Ionesco,” she told The Times in 1983. “That completely exploded me.”
She married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin as he completed his studies. In 1967, when Mr. Levy got a teaching position at the State University of New York at Albany (now Albany University), the couple moved to Kinderhook, NY, where Mrs. Howe began serious work on stage plays.
In 1970, her play “The Nest,” which she described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how fierce and pathetic they are with men,” was given a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. It was a miracle that the first sentence of Clive Barnes’ review in The Times didn’t kill her young career.
‘It is always rash to use superlatives,’ wrote Mr Barnes, ‘but it occurs most forcefully to me that ‘The Nest’, which boldly calls itself a play and opened even more boldly last night at the Mercury Theatre, should are on any reasonable short list of the worst plays I’ve ever seen.
Mrs. Howe, however, went ahead and drew attention not only to ‘Museum’, but also to ‘The Art of Dining’ (performed at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 she won an Obie Award for her recent work. Numerous other awards followed.
One of her most successful plays after ‘Coastal Disturbances’ was ‘Pride’s Crossing’, in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on her life. That play was performed at Lincoln Center in 1997.
“Old women have great power,” Mrs Howe said at the time. “Magic is coming to them. Often they are not on this earth; their thoughts are in never-never-land. But with the magic and the dreams comes the anger that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that kind of animal cry of self-preservation on stage.”
André Bishop, producing artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater, recalled a playwright with a unique style.
“Tina was a wonderfully idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of the absurd permeated all of her work,” he said in a statement. “She was delightful, as were the plays written in her very distinctive voice.”
Mrs. Howe and Mr. Levy settled in Manhattan in 1973, having last lived in the Bronx. Mr. Levy died last year. In addition to her son, Mrs. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.
In an Instagram post yesterday, playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe both a friend and a mentor.
“One of the last times I visited her,” Mrs. Ruhl wrote, “she said, ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country. ”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
