25 June 2011: Howe, Painting Churches
New Century Theatre, performing in Theatre 14, Mendenhall Performance Center, Smith College. Dir. by Keith Langsdale
A three-character, one set play. The elderly Churches are packing up for a move from their old Beacon Hill, Boston home to Cotuit, on the south shore. Fanny and Gardner are expecting their daughter, Margaret, called Mags, a professional artist, to help them pack up. The title initially refers to the agreement Mags has extracted from her parents that they allow her to paint a double portrait of them. The portrait commences about half-way through and is finished in the course of the action, during which we come to understand that each of the elder Churches is deeply flawed and yet deeply dependent on one another, and come to understand also that the daughter’s childhood and indeed her adulthood as well have been gravely problematized by the lack of emotional understanding provided by her parents during her childhood and adolescence.
In a series of scenes, moving ever closer to the day and hour of departure, the history of Mags’s childhood and adolescence is revealed, partly for the better, but mostly for the worse, even as we discover more about Gardner’s illustrious career as a poet. She was banished from the dinner table for six months for playing with her food — by pushing it through her teeth onto the plate, making colorful patterns that utterly fascinated her but which were considered totally unacceptable by her parents, especially her mother. We’re made to understand that these impulses are proto-artistic, as Mags herself has come to view them, and it is because of these impulses that she has eventually set herself on the road toward painterly artistry. Imprisoned in her room, she continues playing with her food but also begins to create shapes out of crayons that have melted on a hot radiator. When her parents discover this — she reminds them of something they apparently have completely forgotten about — they are completely uncomprehending. And it is this lack of comprehension, lack of emotional rapport, that clarifies and in fact shapes the fraught emotional contours of the triadic relationship as it continues to the present day.
One might say that the playwright does not take sides, and it is true that what she reveals here is a deeply bonded couple who ironically have no time, no sympathetic understanding, for the daughter who needs their love and support so much, even while describing a daughter who is herself a difficult, over-sensitive person. And for seemingly good reasons. Mags has kept herself away from these distant parents, reifying that distance to such a degree that she has not kept up with their lives, hardly visiting them as often as once a year. Gardner Church is a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet who holds vast amounts of poetic text in his head, of his own and others, from Keats and Shelley to Dickinson, Yeats, and Frost, and he can recite it well enough to leave his auditors