Theatre in Review: Painting Churches (Keen Company at Theatre Row)

Is there a more fraught relationship than that of parent and child? Most American playwrights would have it so, given the onslaught of family dramas that open each season. (Years ago, when I read plays for a theatre company, I was astonished at the sheer number of scripts that amounted to screeds against the playwrights' parents; the fact that most of them came with a thick glaze of sentimentality did little to make them more palatable.) Even now, nearly 30 years later, few such pieces have managed to be as crazily distinctive as Painting Churches. Taking what, by all rights, should be well-worn material, Tina Howe created her special brand of madcap tragedy, blessedly free of the usual resentments and navel-gazing -- which is not to say that she doesn't have some extremely tough insights to impart.

We are in the drawing room of Gardner and Fanny Church, aging Boston Brahmins who are in the process of vacating their Beacon Hill town house for a home by the shore. Gardner is an eminent poet and critic; Fanny is a professional eccentric, the kind of woman whose life's work involves dominating every conversation in which she is a participant. The sight of Kathleen Chalfant, sitting perfectly erect and staring with utter satisfaction at her reflection in a tea tray, saying, "This is a very good-looking hat, if I do say so," is the first warning that Fanny is something of a handful.

Enter Margaret, their daughter, an artist of note, who has agreed to help with the move if Fanny and Gardner sit for their portrait. It won't be easy; Fanny keeps insisting on getting the packing done first, and when Margaret manages to corral the two of them, they keep fooling around, striking poses à la American Gothic and the Pieta (in the latter case, with martinis in hand). There are pitched over Gardner's massively untidy papers and book collection. The cocktail hour also strikes with increasing frequency, further interrupting Margaret's work. Clearly none of this is new to Fanny and Gardner's put-upon only child; Margaret recalls her first important show, at which Fanny gathered a crowd around her and loudly commented that, in her entry -- another portrait -- Margaret had failed utterly to capture the subject.

Just as clearly, Margaret's desire to paint her parents is an attempt to understand them, a desire made all the more poignant by the fact that Fanny and Gardner have never really seen their precious "Mags" for the talented individual she is. (It's typical that Margaret's account of a terrible childhood trauma is recalled only by Fanny, and only in a general way; they are speechless to learn that she harbors deep feelings about the incident.)

But before Painting Churches can turn into another brief filed in the court of bad parenting, Howe turns the tables on her characters, revealing that Fanny and Gardner's charmingly bizarre behavior is a façade, a Potemkin village erected to hide a much more squalid set of facts. Time and money are running out on them, Gardner is slipping into dementia - the magnum opus he has been tending so obsessively is nothing more than a series of disconnected fragments -- Fanny increasingly must play the caretaker, and the upkeep on their home has become prohibitive. Their move is more like a retreat, their new home a kind of hiding place. "If you want to paint us so badly, you ought to paint us as we really are," snaps Fanny.

Painting Churches isn't riddled with action; it mostly consists of scenes of packing alternating with scenes of painting, with new information about the Churches being revealed that adds to our understanding of them. But anyone who ever endured a set of impossible parents -- a very large segment of the theatre-going audience, I'll wager -- is likely to be captivated and moved by Howe's family portrait. It's her special insight to understand that, by the time one is old enough to press one's parents for an accounting of their failings, they have morphed into different people altogether -- and the effort is suddenly, poignantly, beside the point.

The original 1983 production of Painting Churches would be hard to beat -- I fondly remember it as the moment when I suddenly understood the brilliance of Marian Seldes, whose Fanny was one for the books -- and Carl Forsman's current staging, which certainly has its moments, doesn't really challenge one's memories. But it certainly captures the play's singular tone -- which might be best described as A. R. Gurney gone absurdist -- and it features three very solid performances.

Chalfant's naturally aristocratic manner gives a fine screwball spin to each of Fanny's eccentricities -- and, when she yells for her distracted, and offstage, husband -- she turns each word into its own aria of impatience. A slight falsity does creep into her performance when she is asked express amusement at her predicament, but she's especially good at handing out the bitter facts of life to her daughter, and you always understand the charm that keeps Fanny just on this side of impossibility. With his distinguished air and WASP-ish good looks, John Cunningham is the very picture of Gardner, and he also captures the character's increasing bafflement, his growing inability to manage the simplest details of daily existence. It's all the more moving, then, when he suddenly snaps back, just for a moment, to deliver a word-perfect rendition of a poem by Yeats. Kate Turnbull's Margaret is a bit fidgety at times, especially when she's trying to dramatize her character's anxiety and anger, but she's convincing as a visual artist and she often plays gracefully off her co-stars.

Beowulf Boritt's set design is a lesson in suggesting wealth on a budget. He boils down the Churches' drawing room to its most important components -- a Federal-style hallway, some bookshelves, and a window -- and arranges them, as individual units, in front of some very full drapery. Some well-chosen pieces of furniture complete the effect. Josh Bradford's lighting and Ryan Rumery's sound design are also very solid. I have a slight reservation about Jennifer Paar's costumes; she dresses Gardner and Fanny well-nigh perfectly, but she provides an entrance outfit for Margaret that is a little too studied in its eccentricity. (Given her enormous hat, I wondered if Paar isn't suggesting that Margaret is becoming another Fanny.) "Really, darling, you should pay more attention to your appearance," says Fanny at one point, and I tend to agree.

Still, we should be grateful to Keen Company for giving a very solid mounting of what remains Howe's best work. As any art student will tell you, painting is really a matter of perspective; capture the angle and you will capture your subject. It's the achievement of Painting Churches that Howe gives us her characters from so many angles, finally framing in them a blessed moment of grace. --David Barbour