Playwright Tina Howe could never have written "Painting Churches," a bittersweet comedy about a devoted New England couple confronted by changes in their lives, if her own parents were still alive.
"My parents are long gone," she said during a recent telephone interview from New York. "My mother died in 1976 and my father died in '77 and, in many ways `Painting Churches' was a sort of valentine to their exit, which in real life was much more harrowing."(Salt Lake Acting Company's production of "Painting Churches" continues through Feb. 20. For reservations, contact local ArtTix outlets or call 355-2787.)
Howe said the first production of the play was in 1983.
"It took four years to get it right. I had it wrong, really wrong at first," she said.
In Howe's early versions of the script, Meg - an artist who visits her parents, Gardner and Fanny Church, to paint them for a New York art exhibit - was a pianist coming home to get her mother to help her make her recital dress.
"I wanted to play with music vis-a-vis language. It was so complicated and introverted and embroidered and such an `inside' story that nobody got the point at all. But I kept working on it for three more years and it was sort of fascinating. Meg had a romance with her piano teacher and there was a slapstick scene of her teacher sort of lunging at her while going over her program and it was totally crazy. I read it aloud to Joseph Papp one evening and he was mystified," Howe said.
"Then someone suggested I should just get rid of the music because it doesn't really work to have a character who's not verbal - at least on stage. So I threw out the piano and Meg found her voice, and I rewrote it in about eight months."
But "Painting Churches" is not exactly based on people Tina Howe knows.
"It's all true, but none of it happened, which is often the truth of the plays that playwrights write," she said, adding there is some similarity between Gardner and Fanny Church and her own parents . . . "except that I did not grow up in Boston and my father was not a poet and my mother, in fact, was the painter. So I really mixed them around. But my parents did come from that sort of world of Old Boston, and that was the familiar world I was writing about."
Howe is a born and bred New Yorker. Her other works include "Coastal Disturbances," "Approaching Zanzibar" and "One Shoe Off."
Her father was newscaster Quincy Howe.
In "Painting Churches," the central focus is on Gardner Church, a prize-winning poet whose emotional state is slowly deteriorating, and his outspoken wife, Fanny, who is packing for a move from the large family residence near Harvard to a smaller home on Cape Cod.
"You know, in real life, couples don't usually get that beautiful, final dance together. What happened, in fact, was that my mother predeceased my father and he, in turn, became `undone' and died nine months later," Howe said.
"People have asked me what my parents would have thought about the play. On one level, they would have been horrified by the specter of a New Englander losing his wits and the image of Gardner Church having a tantrum. My parents would have been deeply hurt and stunned by that. I think they would have enjoyed the humor of the play, but I think New Englanders prize their intelligence and `good form' more than anything else. To see another couple being overwhelmed would have frightened them."
Howe was not too pleased, however, with the Turner Network's made-for-TV version, "The Portrait," which was first telecast exactly one year ago.
"When I sold the rights I had a provision that if I didn't like the script, I could change the title. It bore so little resemblance to my original play - although I was flattered that Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall were involved. I just wish they (the producers) hadn't strayed so far from the original, but that's often the case."
Howe said she was asked if she wanted to adapt the script herself, but, she said, "The fact is, we did the play in 1986 on `American Playhouse' for PBS and it was a beautiful production that Jack O'Brien directed with Donald Moffitt, Sada Thompson and Roxanne Hart, so I already had the experience of seeing it work on television.
"But, you see, the whole thing about New Englanders is about how reticent they are, how shy they are, how unable they are to communicate - the effort it takes to look someone in the eye. And in (Turner's) TV version, it was as if they had all gone into therapy together. It was very touchy-feely, talking about their feelings and their emotions, and New Englanders would never do that in a million years."
Although she grew up in New York City, Howe did attend "this wild, experimental high school" in the Midwest. It was University High School ("Uni High"), which was connected to the education program at the University of Illinois, where her father was invited to teach journalism.
"The school was a lab and we were their guinea pigs," she said. "It was wonderful because all these kids were so bright and gifted and I had grown up in a much more elitist situation - the Upper East Side, going to private girls' schools."