Tina Howe’s plays include The Nest, Birth and After Birth, Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Approaching Zanzibar, One Shoe Off, Pride’s Crossing, Such Small Hands, Rembrandt’s Gift and new translations of Eugéne Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson as well as a host of shorter plays. These works premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, Second Stage, The Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, The Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Atlantic Theater Company. Her most recent play, Chasing Manet, is slated to open at Primary Stages this spring. Among her many awards are an Obie for Distinguished playwriting, a Tony nomination for best Play, an Outer Circle Critics Award, a Rockefeller Grant, two N.E.A. Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Sidney Kingsley Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, two honorary degrees and the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre. A two time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Miss Howe has been a Visiting Professor at Hunter College since 1990 and has also taught master classes at NYU, UCLA, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. Her works can be read in numerous anthologies as well as in Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe, and Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays, and most recently her translations of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. Miss Howe is proud to have served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990.

Check out Tina’s plays,
available from Samuel French

APPROACHING ZANZIBAR
THE ART OF DINING
THE BALD SOPRANO
BIRTH AND AFTER BIRTH
COASTAL DISTURBANCES
THE LESSON
MUSEUM
ONE SHOE OFF
PAINTING CHURCHES
PRIDE’S CROSSING
SHRINKING VIOLETS AND TOWERING TIGER LILIES
TEN MINUTE PLAYS FROM ACTORS THEATRE OF LOUISVILLE, VOL. 6

Photo: Tom Bloom

Q & A with Tina Howe

Q: Which are you first, a writer or a woman? (Posed by Honor Moore back in the 60’s)

A: For my first thirty years I thought I was a writer first because I never saw myself as a woman. A woman?

That connotes curves, sauciness and sex appeal—the confidence to take over a room wearing a red satin dress with a plunging neckline or no neckline at all. I came from a family of serious writers. All we ever talked about was what we were working on, what we were reading and who had published what, where.

"I’m a writer first and always!", I trumpeted to Honor who was my first producer, busy editing, The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women. I confessed how much I hated the little girls I grew up with because they were always teasing me for being so weird and tall at the elite all-girl schools I went to.

"My point exactly," she said. "All of us have been marginalized because of our gender."

It wasn’t until I started writing plays and was labeled a "woman playwright" that I realized Honor was right. Of course I’m a woman first! All my plays are about female experience! Part of the thrill of seeing Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano in Paris back in the 60’s was realizing no one had ever looked at us through such a deliriously profound lens.

Destiny called!

I would dramatize the giddiness and terror of our rituals. I would take on the sacred cows of daughterhood, sisterhood, wifehood, motherhood and old agehood. My early plays, The Nest, Birth and After Birth and later One Shoe Off, did just that and all closed in a night or were never produced. So I switched to more elegiac fare, miming the footfalls of doomed Wasps as they drifted up and down Boston town houses and New England beaches—Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances and Pride’s Crossing. These plays fared much better, because they were safer and more familiar.

Along the way I’ve also written a handful of short comedies about women in distress, since actresses and artistic directors are always begging me to write parts for the ladies—young ladies, middle aged ladies and grandmothers. Samuel French is happily anthologizing them in Shrinking Violets and Towering Tiger Lilies—a Bouquet of Female Delights: Seven Brief Plays About Women in Distress. And now Chasing Manet, starring Jane Alexander and Lynn Cohen is about to open at Primary Stages. It follows the adventures of two old ladies—a Wasp and a Jew, as they plot an unlikely escape from a nursing home. There’s no rage like old lady rage since the membranes between what they should do and what they want to do have pretty much evaporated. I can’t wait to see how the audience will respond. With flowers or tomatoes?

For a dramatist who deeply resents being labeled a "woman playwright", I remain obsessed with female experience. So, what’s my problem? Women are my subject, after all? The same problem all us lady playwrights share. By putting "woman" in front of our profession, it’s a qualifier implying we’re not quite up to the male standard.

Shouldn’t playwright be enough?