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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
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The Theatrical
Vision of Tina Howe
By: Gwendolyn
Turnbull |
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A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of
the William Inge Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre Award, Tina
Howe is considered by many to be one of the great living American
playwrights. Tina was our judge for the 2004 Arts & Letters Prize in
Drama, in which she selected Staci Swedeen’s, The Secret of Our Success. Her
visit to campus was born of David Muschell’s years of persistence in
convincing her to be a judge—his persistence, she admitted, and his charm.
But when Tina arrived from the airport, we were the ones who were charmed. There didn’t seem time enough in a day for Tina.
She became a child in the endless corridors of the pecan orchards, reveled in
the foreboding of the forgotten buildings at Central State Hospital, and was
nearly thrown out of Yun’s Fashion Shop for taking pictures of Staci trying
on wigs—apparently a criminal offense and expressly forbidden by Yun herself.
But Tina disarmed Yun as she disarmed the rest of
us. She has the vision of a mystic and the heart of woman who’s either grown
back into her childhood or simply never grown out of it. We’re grateful for
her touching down in our world and passing on to us her wisdom. * You have been writing for thirty years and have
already left an indelible mark on the modern stage. Discuss your evolution as a
playwright. Chart the journey from
some of your earliest plays to your most recent work. I have to say that the earlier work was more
adventurous. It broke more rules. In many ways, it was more original. There was an urgency about it. It was more
ostensibly about female rites of passage, such as courtship, motherhood. And it became abundantly clear as I tried
to have these plays produced that theaters everywhere were appalled by my
unbridled imagination. I had been hugely influenced by Ionesco because I
lived in This was now in the mid-seventies. I cast a very cold, steady eye on the kind
of work that was being done and embraced.
I noticed that these plays were set in extraordinary settings, like
the Changing Room set in a locker room, Jumpers set in a night club, and
Seascape set on a beach. It was clear
to me that audiences wanted escape.
They didn’t want to be plopped back into kitchens, living rooms, or
bedrooms; they wanted adventure. So, I
deliberately set out to find a setting that wouldn’t be as threatening as
what I had been working on, and I decided on a museum because very little
happens in a museum. When you’re most
moved you’re most silent. It occurred to me that if I could animate a museum
in terms of what museums do, in other words, not use it as a setting for a
romance or a mystery, but if I could explore how museums function in a
theatrical way, that would not only be an original offering, it would also be
producible. And so I set out to write
Museum, which in many ways is the most complicated of my plays; there are
forty-four characters who have these endless entrances and exits. Here I was trying to be commercial, and I
ended up writing a play with forty-four characters. Oddly enough, it only took me six months to
write. Normally, it takes me two years
to write a play that has any coherency at all. It was so clear what I wanted to do that it
came very fast. Actually, I wrote most
of it the summer I went up to Because it had such an enormous cast, Bob decided
to co-direct it with a friend of his, Dana Elcar. As if forty-four characters were not
enough, Bob added a guided tour of ten more characters at the end, so there
were often more people on stage than in the audience. Los Angeles Actors Theatre was a free
theatre which meant the audience didn’t pay to get in, the actors weren’t
paid, I wasn’t paid, nobody was paid.
We were clearly doing it for the love of theatre itself. Oddly enough, it was a triumph, and
audiences ate it up. I called Joe Papp
up and said, “Look, Jane gave you this play of mine, Museum, and it’s being
done in Your settings tend to be extravagant and
elaborate; as you write do you consider the daunting challenges of production
that your plays invariably create? Do
you ever say to yourself, “this just can’t be done?” Never! I
believe what audiences crave in the theatre is surprise. They look forward to the house lights
coming down and…BAM, they’re at the beach, or inside a bus, or at a
restaurant. I feel it’s the
playwright’s obligation to entertain the audience and take them to new
places. I’ve always found that clever set designers love a
challenge. That’s why they went to
design school in the first place. I
always start with the setting. It’s
the first thing I think about when I write a play. I’m so determined to entertain and
surprise, I go out of my way to look for exotic locations. It’s almost become my calling card. It wasn’t until I had written about seven
full-length plays that I realized the one thing I had never attempted was a
road play where the scenes keep changing.
So I wrote Approaching Zanzibar, and was lucky enough to get the very
gifted Heidi Landesman to design it. The
first scene takes place in a car, the second in a tent, the third in a
stream, the fourth in a tent again.
There’s also a scene in a sailboat.
The characters end up in a in a dying woman’s house in Taos, New
Mexico, and the play closes with this little girl jumping on this bed that
was actually a trampoline so she could shoot ten feet up in the air. For
safety’s sake, the trampoline had to be bolted into the floor, which meant
that the entire design had to be built around this hidden trampoline. Heidi did the entire show with fabric. Fabric covered the shell of the car and
then was raised by this complicated manual backstage pulley system. It would be raised into a tent and then
dropped to become a lake then be raised to become the sails on a boat. It was extraordinary! The audience went wild. What about your fascination with food and
artists. Is there a connection between
the two? All of my plays seem to be about artists because I
feel the artist is the only hero we have left. They’ll sacrifice anything for their
vision. Statesmen and politicians
don’t have the same purity. In one way
or another, all of my plays are about the artist trying to find his or her
voice. The food thing comes from the fact that sitting
down to dinner was scary for me, growing up.
Meal time was about exchanging news of the day. My brother and I were raised to have
impeccable table manners, but ultimately, meal time was about being
entertaining and telling funny stories.
We were expected to be charming, even as children. So when it was time to sit down at the
table, my throat just closed up because I knew I had to entertain. I wasn’t anorexic. It’s just that eating is almost impossible
if you’re trying to be a stand-up comic.
So food was always a loaded issue for me. I was usually sent from the table in
disgrace for being too silly. That’s
where the nightmare scenario from Painting Churches came from, when Mags is
sent to her room and starts melting crayons on the radiator, which I used to
do as a child. I just used my
imagination and realized that melted crayons could be mistaken for food that
had been spit out. I also find food very funny. Nothing is more hilarious than watching
actors eat on stage. There’s a lot of
eating and drinking in my plays because it’s an opportunity to play havoc
with polite behavior. What sets the playwright apart from other creative
writers? To be a playwright you must love the theatre, and
that means you have to love things that are theatrical in size. I often say that playwriting isn’t as much
about language as it is about event.
As important as language is, ultimately, plays are about what
happens. Playwrights tend to be people
who have vivid and compelling imaginations.
We choose to write about dramatic collisions. The poet writes more about states of
consciousness, as do novelists, but the mandate of the playwright is to
explore extraordinary behavior that involves extraordinary change and
revelation. Playwrights tend to be
theatrical people. It’s also a
glamorous field to be in because you’re surrounded by talented actors and
sometimes even stars. It’s much more
of a public arena than being a poet or
fiction writer. I got into the theatre because, this is so
pathetic, more than anything I wanted to be a clown. I wanted to make people laugh. My idols were the Marx Brothers. Growing up as a twelve foot tall girl who
weighed ninety pounds, had buck teeth, glasses and straight hair, the only way
I could survive was to make people laugh with me before they laughed at me.
Embracing the theatre was a very logical choice because as the writer
I could be hidden. I could be the
source of the entertainment, but nobody could see how tall and funny looking
I was. It was a win/win situation. You have said, “I sometimes think the whole reason
I write plays is so I can ignite these lunatic climaxes when all hell breaks
loose.” Do you envision the climax
first or do your characters invariably lead you to it? I’m usually pretty aware of what the big event is
going to be, which is why I want to write the play in the first place. The play I’m working on now is set in a
nursing home. My aunt was put in the
Baptist Home for the Aged, right next to where my brother lived in
Riverdale. We moved her from More than that I knew that I wanted them to
escape. When my Aunt Maddy was so
withdrawn and rolled up in the fetal position, I would say to my brother, who
was a classical scholar, “Where is she? Is she in her girlhood You have said, “Because plays are essentially
internal landscapes, the poor writer can never make out the forests from the
tree.” Do you think your characters
create your settings or vice versa? It’s ironic, I’m not terribly intellectual and
have a very low I.Q., but I’m totally motivated by ideas. I suddenly realized when I was doing Master
classes at Columbia that I had very
little interest in psychology, and that’s the last thing I think about when I
start a new play. I begin with the
setting, the world of the play, and the ideas that fuel it. Then, I have to confess, I bend the
characters into the behavior I want them to exhibit. They eventually take over, but not until
the themes and architecture are firmly in place. What are some of the difficulties in translating
another’s work? The primary challenge of translating Ionesco’s
Bald Soprano was trying to approximate the hilarity of the play in French,
which is a much funnier language. It’s
so crunchy, like biting into a handful of caramel corn, with all those
rolling of the Rs and guttural sounds.
When I took my Most of the present English translations are
literal, which means the translators were loyal to the actual words but
forgot to pay attention to the rhyming, punning, and outrageous humor that
was exploding. To translate Ionesco
literally is to do him a great disservice because his plays are so
musical. I know French well, but I
know English even better, so it meant being relaxed with it and letting
Ionesco wash over me. More than
anything, it was a lesson in relaxation.
The reference book I had at my side most often was a rhyming
dictionary—not a French dictionary. I
was determined to capture the delirium, atmosphere, and humor of the French
version, and I think I came pretty close in.
You have been a visiting professor at One can certainly teach the craft of
playwriting. Vision, however, is
something else. Most of my students
take the class because they’re in the Masters’ program and think, “Oh
Playwriting! That sounds like fun!” So I get a lot of students who have never
written a play in their lives. Many
are actors as well. By the end of two
semesters, they know about dramatic structure and what a play is. What I can’t teach, of course, is how to
have an original voice. That comes
from within. The best students I’ve had tend to come from the
Creative Writing Program. Since
they’ve been fiction writers, they know about how language sounds. Mimicking emotion is tricky. How does someone in agony sound? Harold Pinter’s characters don’t finish
their sentences, and fall mute. It’s
very hard to give someone an ear. The
best playwrights come in with a vision.
They are in the class because there is a play they want to write, not
because they want to be a playwright. Whose recent work are you most excited about
today? I am very excited by the work of a poet Anne
Carson, a poet who writes haunting narrative poems. Lately, she’s started translating Greek
tragedy as well. She has phenomenal
visions in her head, and her language is so gorgeous. I am still a huge Ionesco fan and keep
rereading his plays. I also love Chris
Durang. There’s a new, young writer,
Sarah Rhul, who won the Susan Blackburn Award this year. She wrote a play called The Clean House
that got four simultaneous productions this year. I was very taken with Chuck Mee’s Big Love, which
has to be performed on a padded floor because the brides get so riled up they
keep hurling themselves on the floor because they’re being forced to marry
men they don’t love. Then the grooms start hurling themselves on
the floor in even more dramatic ways.
When I first saw the play, I burst into tears; it was so thrilling. I love physical theatre because I love the
Marx Brothers. There is something
tremendously moving about anarchy. Comment on the future of the American Stage. Mercifully, we go through cycles. Because I am a Tony voter, I see almost
everything on Broadway, I also see a lot to Off-Broadway work. At the moment, I think we’re in a rather
conservative frame of mind with lots of plays about dysfunctional families that
seem like they could be made for television.
But the great thing about the theatre is that it keeps changing. Very few new straight plays appear on
Broadway these days. But the pendulum
keeps swinging, and you never know what’s going to come along in the next
five minutes. |
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