William Inge Theatre Festival

Tina Howe

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The following interview transcript with Tina Howe has been carefully broken down into segments involving a variety of topics. Below each segment is a link to the corresponding video clip. Please attribute research sources to Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William Inge Center for the Arts.
Father
	Well, my parents were both Bostonians. My father, Quincy Howe, was a news commentator. And when I was growing up he did the evening news on the radio on CBS, and there’s something decidedly bizarre about hearing your own father doing the evening news, because in real life he had a lot on his mind, and he was quite forgetful and would be walking down the street and he’d suddenly go, “Oh Teen’, I’m going the wrong way. Sorry.” And he would turn around and go the other way. So to hear him give the evening news, I was always rather suspect about how accurate it was, and to this day I have a lot of trouble, you know, watching the television or even reading the newspaper and wondering about how true it is. But he came from a very literary family. His father was one of eighteen children. His father was Mark DeWolfe Howe who was a man of letters, a poet who lived to be 96. He was young enough to see soldiers coming home from the Civil War, and he lived long enough to vote for John F. Kennedy for President. And he published over fifty books in his lifetime. He won a Pulitzer in biography and was a very sweet, sweet man And like his father and his brother, Mark Howe, who was a law professor at Harvard, he worked all the time. He worked seven days a week, I would say fifteen hours a day. And so growing up in this household I was very aware, you know, that Daddy’s working and we have to be quiet, but I was also aware that if you want to be a writer, and if you want to achieve anything, you’re supposed to work seven days a week for fifteen hours. And Thanksgivings and family occasions were always about, “What are you reading, what are you writing, what are you working on, what poetry are you interested in?” My father could recite verse at the drop of a hat and would always, you know, launch forth. He loved E. E. Cummings. He had very eclectic taste. His favorite novel was James Joyce’s Ulysses, and when I was sick with hepatitis coming back from Paris – my year of wild abandon – and I ended up in Roosevelt Hospital with this galloping case of hepatitis, Daddy came every day on his lunch hour – I was there for three weeks – and he read James Joyce’s Ulysses out loud to me during his lunch hour. So, it was I suppose a rather unusual household. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Mother
	But both my mother and her sister, you know, in retrospect I can see how hard it was for them to grow up as young women. Neither of them went to college. Neither of them had professions. My mother wasn’t particularly enamored of having children. She didn’t quite know what to do with us. We had a nanny when we were growing up. And she had all of this energy and all of this sort of wonderful, fey, I don’t know, attitude about her. And she was an artist. She did watercolors and collected obje’. But she had nowhere to put it all. Now that I look back on it, I just wish that she could have been encouraged, and someone could have seen her as a talented woman who had a contribution to make, but neither she or my Aunt Mattie were given that opportunity. I think their lives were…there was a lot of quiet desperation. Well it’s this weird thing that she always claimed to be pulverizingly shy. And I claim to be pulverizingly shy, and nobody believes it, but I think what happens, when you’re really shy, is that there’s some wanton streak in you that becomes an exhibitionist, because if you can get people to laugh with you, they won’t laugh at you. And so she was very funny, she was very irreverent, she was a complete original. And because my father was so much shorter than her, she sort of went out of her way to accentuate her height. So she wore her hair in an upsweep. She’d had it…permanent in it that was on top of her hair, all of these curls. And then she wore a little wig on top of the curls, and then she always wore a hat on top of the wig, and usually the hat had a feather or, I don’t know, a chicken or an enormous bouquet of some sort. So that when she was all done up, she was easily six-foot-two. And then she also loved to collect small animal skeletons. So that you would come into the house and there would be these, you know, miniatures – exquisite miniatures of her Grandmother held in a gold case with pearls around the edge, and then there’d be a raccoon skull, and then there’d be a pin cushion from the Niagara Falls, and then there’d be a sea shell with the Last Supper carved in it, and then there’d be an enormous grouping of strawberries that looked very real but in fact they were lead and had been painted red to look real, and there would be, oh, all sorts of strange little objects. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Grandmother
	My Grandmother was a great reader. They had an entire room in their house in the country in Beverly Farms, it was a library. She had the complete works of Thackeray, the complete works of Shakespeare. She felt that all of Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. She was a pianist. This beautiful Steinway baby grand she bequeathed to me. She loved the Romantics. She was wonderful playing Chopin. And as a little girl I would sit next to her on the piano bench, and she would sort of wave her fingers, and all of her diamond rings would fall off onto the ebony top of the piano, and she would launch into her Chopin. To tell you the truth, I was rather afraid of her, because she was very severe, very tall, and she wore long velvet clothes that I seem to be wearing myself (laughs). I thought they were so wonderful in that once you get over fifty or over sixty you were supposed to march around the house in long, velvet clothes. I have this locket that I bought at a little antique shop that’s French that says “mascot,” and I have pictures of my children inside, and my Grandmother had a locket around her neck that had her Grandmother’s hair in it, a lock of this rather dusty hair. It was a rather revolting little specimen. So she was a tremendous snob. She was very narrow-minded as to other classes and other ethnicities and other religions, and she was… she was a terrible snob. My father was, you know, a Democrat and a Leftie in his youth, and I think I inherited that – you know, those attitudes from him. And so when my Grandmother would, you know, hold forth about all of the grand Presidents of Harvard and Heads of Mass General and all of her relatives, I just found it revolting. I was seven, eight years old, and she would show me these pictures of these hoary-headed, bearded men who had done of these extraordinary things, and I just found it repellant. And so I spent most of my time, when I stayed with them in Beverly Farms, down in the kitchen with the Irish maids, which is what you see in Pride’s Crossing, that split in that household. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
	Well, I grew up three blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 82^nd between Park and Lex, and in the old days, it was free, and on a rainy day my mother would say to my brother and me, “Oh, go to the Museum and play.” And so I grew up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we, you know, we spent a lot of time with the armor and with the Egyptians, but then I got into the Renaissance: tryptics of the crucifixes and the, you know, the digging of Christ out of the tomb, of the blue Christs and the weeping Madonnas and Mary Magdalenes. I went through a long period of just going mad for those. You know, I was probably ten years old, and I would just spend a lot of time standing in front of them. And I guess in terms of my plays, that I feel the artist is the ultimate hero. Who are you going to write about who one could admire who sacrifices everything for what they believe in? And, you know all of my plays are about the artists in one way or another. When I saw my first Joseph Cornell shadowbox, I thought I had been struck by lightning. And then I’ve had a very intense Joseph Cornell period – whenever he’d have a show, and unfortunately he died before I could ever lay eyes on him. Although I have a friend who visited him in Utopia Parkway who really knew him quite well. But I loved his shadowboxes, I think because they were sort of like miniature stage sets. And I particularly liked the empty ones. I liked the ones, the sort of, the abstract ones where life has been emptied from them, and you hear the dying footfalls, but I became this huge Cornell fan. And then I became a huge Louise Bourgeois fan. I love her work, her installations, her cells in Brooklyn. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Discovering Ionesco
	That was a year after I graduated from college. My father gave me the most remarkable choice of either going to Europe for a year or going to graduate school, as if one had to think twice about that, so my dear friend Jana Alexander and I jumped on a steam ship to go to Europe. She to Edinburgh to study, supposedly, mathematics, and me to Paris to study, supposedly, philosophy, and within two months, Jane was acting in the Fringe. I had given up my philosophy classes and was writing my first full-length play. While I was there, a friend…and I hadn’t really known about Ionesco, because I never studied theatre in college or anywhere for that matter. And this friend said, “Oh, we much go see these plays at this tiny little theatre de la huchette where they had been playing for almost fifty years. So I went in not knowing what to expect. The French production is done with the utmost restraint and is very comme il faut and the characters, even though they’re British, of course, are speaking French. It’s their politesse that is so hilarious because they never crack, and they never break under pressure, because the words that they say are totally delirious and insane, and I think what struck me was the familiarity, because I grew up in a very literary household with rather eccentric parents, and conversation and language was held in very high esteem, but our behavior was decidedly aberrant. So to see these uptight British people behaving on the surface as polite people but then gradually becoming more and more unhinged was this extraordinary familiarity and recognition. And the other thing was that the audience was laughing very, very hard, because just when you think it can’t get any insaner, it does become more insane. So it was that combination of the high-jinks on the stage and the audience, the French audience, because they are very responsive, shrieking with laughter, and me shrieking along with them. It was as if I had been hit in the head with a thunderbolt. It was like, “Yes I know this. I understand this.” And it sort of changed my life. I mean I knew I wanted to write plays, and I had never seen anything like this before. And for a long time, his work greatly influenced mine. When I came back to the states, I wrote rather wild plays about female experience. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Nest
	Having spent a year in Paris and having discovered Ionesco and the Bald Soprano, and then the Rhinoceros opened the same year I was living there, I realized that it was high time that somebody applied the same sort of delirium to female experience. And so, I wanted to write a play about how women compete for men, because to my knowledge this has really never been explored in a theatrical way. Perhaps on television, but not as theater. So I imagined this evening of three female roommates desperate to find men, inviting two guys that they know, and one invites a friend that they don’t know, and by the end of the evening one of the women has somehow finagled one of the men to marry her. So, the play was very much about females and trapping men. And part of the trap involved her…the last course for dessert at this dinner party – the cook, who was a very large fat woman, wheels out an enormous wedding cake that, in my stage directions, was supposed to be nine feet tall, but life being such that it is it was six feet tall and covered with whip cream, fake whip cream so that it wouldn’t rot every night, and I wanted the woman who was after this guy to literally take off all of her clothes and jump into the cake and have him lick the icing off of her, because this would certainly be an enticement to get him to marry her. So it was all in service of a rather profound and upsetting reality of what women will do to get guys to come to the altar with them. So, it wasn’t just me being wildly wanton, but there was a rationale behind it. And the play was first done at a theater called Act Four in Provincetown, Massachusetts with Sally Kirkland playing that role. And it was a huge success. The local critics loved it, and people came up from New York. I got an agent. There was a huge buzz around it. And then we did it Off-Off-Broadway at a theater in New York called the Mercury Theater on 13^th Street which no longer exists. I don’t remember – there were casting changes, and I don’t remember exactly how they filled out – but we got Jill to play the part that Sally had played, and she didn’t seem to mind taking off her clothes and jumping into the cake. God knows Richard Jordan didn’t mind licking the frosting off of her. But, you know, I had been seeing these wonderfully mischievous plays in Paris, and I thought, “When is somebody going to look at female experience through this same sort of lens?” And I thought that I would be appreciated for this, and that people would be grateful for me and say, “Thank God, finally a woman has kicked off the traces and is letting her imagination fly.” On the contrary. Clive Barnes said, of the ten worst plays he’d ever seen in his life, that The Nest went right at the top. And so we closed in a night. I must say the production did get a little out of hand, though. We were sort of adding bananas to bananas to bananas to bananas – so that by the time we got to that scene, it was truly chaos…not necessarily choreographed chaos, but just chaos, you know, in and of itself. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Birth and After Birth: The genesis
	And then the next play, Birth and After Birth, having written about how women compete for a husband, then the next play was about how they compete over their fertility. Because we didn’t have children for five years, ‘cause I put Norman through college and graduate school. And my German sister-in-law would say, (in a sharp German accent) “Tina, when will you have the children. If you don’t have the children you are not a woman.” And I found that so offensive and disturbing, and I decided I wanted to write a play in which there’s two couples, and one has a child, and the other doesn’t. And to show how each harasses the other side. I mean, to this day, I think it’s my most original work, bar none. And I gave it to my agent who was thrilled to represent me after The Nest, and he read it and submitted it to every legitimate theater across the country, and every legitimate theater returned it saying, “This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read.” He couldn’t get anyone to do it, and eventually he despaired of representing me. I didn’t know, but Norman ran into him on the street a few years later, and Norman said, “So, what’s going on with Tina?” And he said, “Oh, didn’t you know? I don’t represent her anymore.” So I realized that writing frisky plays about female experience was not going to get me anywhere. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Birth and After Birth: Adult as toddler
	I knew, given his emotional size, given the demands that he makes, I knew that he had to be played by a large adult. And the first few guys who did it were very overweight and pink and bald – oh they were wonderful. They looked like ice cream sodas, these pink, bald men raging on the floor. It was just the best. They were fabulous. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Museum: The genesis
	So I looked around to see the kinds of plays that were succeeding, you know, on and off Broadway. And I noticed – this was around the time of The Changing Room, The Contractor, Jumpers, where plays were set in extraordinary places, and it was clear the audience didn’t want something domestic. They didn’t want a kitchen, they didn’t want a living room, but they wanted a seascape, they wanted a beach, they wanted a locker room. And so I tried to think of an environment that had never been put on the stage that would be a very unlikely place to put onstage, and I thought of a museum. Because, in fact, nothing happens in a museum. You know, it’s a temple of silence where people look. And I didn’t want to use a museum as a meeting place for lovers or as a setting for a spy story. I wanted to write a play that shows how art is consumed and how people go to museums because they want to be part of something larger than themselves, and how they want to appropriate it. And so I wrote this rather complicated play with 44 characters coming in and out of the museum, and it was really… you know people have asked me, “Where’s the structure?” And I say, “Oh, well the structure is very clear to me. The play begins with an announcement about the destruction of The Birth of Venus at Uffizi. A hooded man pumped 23 bullets into this painting.” And so immediately the audience knows that danger is afoot and anything can happen. And in the course of the play, there are these small encroachments on the artwork, and the play ends with one of the pieces being dismantled. The viewer is taking it, you know, stealing it and taking pieces of it out of the museum. And here I thought, you know, I’m writing about aesthetics, they can’t get me this time. But I guess I couldn’t control my randy side, and so I end with this enormous act of destruction, in all of these people tearing apart this clothesline that has not only the clothes but the bodies inside the clothes, and I wanted them all put together with Velcro, so that when somebody pulls off a head, there’s that sound of the head being ripped off of the neck. And there were moments of sublime dizziness and of sublime destruction, but through some extraordinary series of, I don’t know, fortunate strokes, Joseph Papp ended up doing it at the Public Theater. And because I was safe in that environment, we got mixed reviews, but he couldn’t boot me out after one night, and so we continued the run, and it was quite successful. And now the play is done all over the country by stock and amateur groups. And it just had a wonderful revival by the Keen Company last…two springs ago. But now it’s done with seventeen actors who double and triple in their roles. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Museum: Inspired by real artists
	I wanted it to look for all the world like a real gallery, and I wanted the audience to look at the artworks. I chose three…I mean the artists I made them up, but they’re all based on actual artists: Agnes Vaag, the one I made up, does these weird little constructions out of animal skeletons and antenna and fur and wings – sort of like what Nancy Graves was doing. And then I have four enormous white paintings that were a sort of homage to both Robert Ryman and Rauschenberg. And then I had a clothesline with the clothes and the bodies which was sort of a merging of Duane Hanson and Siegel, who does the plaster bodies. And my ultimate fantasy was to do it in a museum – like at a place like the Whitney, that’s where I imagined the play taking place. By day, people would walk through real Duane Hansons and real Nancy Graves – it would be a legitimate show – and then in the evening, bleachers would be rolled into those rooms, and the same audience would come back, and they would essentially see themselves, you know, looking at these objects. And that was always my dream. And I remember asking Joe if there was any way we could get the real models that my pieces were based on, or if we could do it in a museum. And he said, “The insurance would be prohibitive. We just can’t do that.” But I did want to blur the lines between the visual arts and the dramatic arts. That was very much on my mind. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Museum: Two points of view
	Well, I try to have the real rabid art lovers and the skeptics. And, you know, people, when the play was initially done, said, “How do you feel about modern art?” And I said, “Well I feel divided. I feel it is a paradox. And sometimes it does seem laughable, and other times it seems totally profound.” Hopefully in Museum, I covered all the bases. At least that was my intent, that, you know, the laughing ladies come in, and they see those four white paintings and one of them goes, “Oh that would look good in my den, but that would look good in your bedroom.” “Oh no, that would look good in your bedroom and that would look good…” But then at the very end of the play, the artist’s deaf mute parents come in, and they stand transfixed in front of these paintings, and they start signing about remembering how buoyant and noisy their son was – their son who they couldn’t hear as a child--and recalling his energy and recalling his gift, and they are sort of bathed in the light of the paintings, and it is a very…it’s a sort of religious moment of them seeing their son through these white paintings, and that is what I think art is about. That the really wonderful artist lets you see things that you never saw before. So there are moments, hopefully, of real beauty and awe in the play, and I’ve tried to mix it up so that there’s total chaos and Vaudeville, but then I think there are moments of beauty and wordlessness. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Art of Dining: The genesis
	Having written the play about how the man in the street appropriates art and wants to consume it, the next play that I wrote I wanted to show the artist at work. Having shown the artist’s work being devoured, I then wanted to show the artist at work. So the next play was The Art of Dining and I… Because I was trying to think of what artist would be interesting to watch in the theater, because a writer would be deeply boring. A musician could get sort of technical and tricky, and I thought of a cook – because so many people cook, and they love to cook, and cooking is very theatrical, and so I chose this character of this gourmet cook who’s opened a restaurant and, I mean, believe it or not, all of these plays are very carefully thought out, and there is an aesthetic design at work that I’m trying to realize. And both Museum and The Art of Dining were deliberately addressing aesthetic questions that I had in mind and were trying to sort of bury the intention under comic behavior, but I knew exactly what I was doing. Every now and again, somebody who’s writing a thesis on me will discover, will realize that, and I’m always thrilled, and I jump up and down. But you know the man in the street doesn’t necessarily get that in the work. Both of those plays were very much preoccupied with the artistic process. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Art of Dining: Ellen and Elizabeth
	And in fact, Ellen is the cook and she’s a, what’s the word? She’s totally relaxed in her body, and she’s a natural woman, and she’s at ease with herself. And I had a friend, actually, named Ellen Smith, who was a wonderful cook. Elizabeth is this very high-strung, panic-stricken short story writer who’s come to the restaurant to meet this man who announces early on that he wants to publish her stories. And there’s a point at which, when Elizabeth is so overwhelmed, after having spilled half of her food all over herself, where she tries to escape, and she wants to go to the ladies room, and she has on somebody else’s glasses. And she starts crawling out of the restaurant, hopefully looking for the ladies room, and instead ends up in the kitchen. And Ellen, meanwhile, has turned off all the lights and gone on strike, and there’s this moment when these two women face each other and…any actress who’s done these roles realizes at some point that they are the two sides of the same coin. One is the artist that is at home with her art and herself and the other is the panic-stricken one. Actually, I’m not much of a cook, and I had trouble eating as a child. I was never anorexic, I just wasn’t interested in food, and I’m not interested in food. But because of that, I thought I could turn my lack of interest in food – I could turn it on its head and create a character who loved to cook, so that I got the other side of Elizabeth being this woman who was a phenomenal cook and just came to life in the kitchen, like my friend Ellen Smith. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The Art of Dining: Real food vs. mime
	However, one of the most thrilling productions I ever saw was done by a guy called…(takes a moment to consider) Paul Berman, who taught at Barnard. And Paul had worked with Ionesco, and Paul did a production without any food at all. It was all mimed. And because the actors didn’t have to worry about the weight and the velocity of the food, they could concentrate completely on the language and on the behavior. And so it was a phenomenally musical production – the music of the play was just extraordinary, and they mimed it. You know, once you see people spooning an imaginary dessert into their mouths and oohing and ahhing, the audience will accept that conceit in two seconds flat, and then there was no problem. It was one of the most thrilling productions I ever saw in my life, without any food at all. And I remember when the play went to the Kennedy Center somebody telling me, I think I heard it right, that they spent—is this possible--$12,000 a week on the food. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

From Dining to Painting
	I’m the panic-stricken writer who doesn’t know how to eat and doesn’t know how to behave. No! That’s…and actually that’s my favorite of all of my plays, because I am so utterly naked in that piece, and every time I see it, it is just excruciatingly divine to watch, because that poor girl suffers so. And when she tells these stories – one of the ways she has of avoiding eating is by talking. So she tells these endless stories about mealtime. They were all true. They were all about my mealtime with my parents. And so once I told those stories and saw how people responded to them, because audiences loved the show, I then realized it’s enough with aesthetics. And the next play, I decided I have to put those parents on the stage. I have to put those mealtimes…I have to put what preceded those mealtimes on the stage. And that’s how Painting Churches came about. Once I was able to talk about, you know, dinner time with my mother and father, then perhaps I could put them on stage. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Painting churches: Crayons on radiators
	Well I grew up in this apartment on 82^nd between Park and Lexington, and we had these old-fashioned radiator covers. They were metal that had all these tiny little holes in them, I guess to let the heat out. And as a child – and I loved coloring in my coloring books. I just loved to color. And I was sick all the time. I was always home from school with a cold, and my mother brought me all these coloring books, and I just loved it. So I had thousands of crayons, and I suddenly realized one day that a sharpened crayon would fit into the hole in the radiator. So I used to grab my Crayola and force it into the radiator hole and then watch it melt. Once I did that to one crayon, I did it to all 56 crayons, so that the radiator, by the end of the winter, was just dripping with all of this wax of many colors, and they were beautiful. And I remember loving to do that. So when I wrote about the mother’s upset with the girl at dinner time… I was often sent from the table for being, I don’t know, silly or not eating or whatever. And I just made that connection between melting the crayons in my room, and because I made Mags an artist, in her eyes she was perhaps creating something. And that the mother would come in and see this wonderful creation and would mistake it for food. When I got that idea, it was thrilling to me, that it was one of those miraculous sort of metaphors that you suddenly pull out of nowhere, and I was just thrilled, and I knew, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it! I’ve got this scene. I’ve got the whole ending. And then Mags could say, “You didn’t notice what I did, and you still don’t notice me.” I had the whole thing sort of laid out in front of me. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Painting Churches: Fact or fiction
	I guess the beauty of the experience of Painting Churches is that, you know it clearly was a fantasy that Fanny and Gardner have this wonderful last waltz before they go off to Cape Cod to end their days. In real life there was no waltz like that. My mother died suddenly of a stroke, and then my father turned his face to the wall and gave up and then was gone nine months later. So there was no wonderful rhapsodic, romantic moment. And there usually isn’t in life, and that I think is the function of the artist – to create the illusion that maybe there is a last dance, and maybe the daughter will be recognized. But it’s all wish, but I think that’s what the theater is all about. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Coastal Disturbances: Sand
	Six tons at Second Stage at the little theater and twenty tons at Circle in the Square. But somebody told me that it’s cheaper than doing a traditional set, because all you have to do, you get industrial sand, and the only furniture is the lifeguard stand – so that’s it. Carol Rothman, the director, had this ingenious idea of putting the lifeguard stand on a turntable, so it would turn indicating a different day, a different time of day, different weather. And that was a wonderful idea, except sand kept getting caught in the turntable, and they were always having to clean it out. No, I think the whole point of writing plays is to take audiences to unlikely places, and my impression has always been that set designers love a challenge, and I truly believe you can set a play anywhere, and I tell my students this, and I believe it. The happy set designer is the set designer who’s challenged. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Meeting Ionesco
	I was invited to introduce Ionesco when he came to do a reading at the 92^nd street ‘Y’ in 1986, because the woman who ran the poetry series knew my work and knew what a fan I was, and I was beside myself with excitement, and spent the week before memorizing this long tribute and just, you know, night and day, in the tub, at the pool, over the computer, changing my socks. I became a monster to live with, so that by the time the event happened, my husband wasn’t talking to me, because I was so nervous and excited about this extraordinary opportunity. So, I met le maitre backstage, and I was expecting a rather jolly, merry man, and I found, on the contrary, that he was a rather sad, broken man. He had been suffering from rheumatism, which is why he had to cancel his original date and came a couple of months later. But I was very struck by a melancholy that hung about him. And I’m almost six feet tall, and so there was something odd that when you see your icon and you tower over him. So, for the photograph, they had him sitting on boxes and me sort of sitting at his feet to look as if we were at the same level. But it was just thrilling for me to breathe the same air. You know, for a few moments we were literally breathing the same air, and I just have such admiration, and I’m in such awe of him, I think because of his extraordinary theatricality. I love to ask this question of people, “Who do you prefer, Beckett or Ionesco?” And I think one would have to say that Beckett is the greater poet, but I think that Ionesco is the greater theatre artist, that he understands and uses theatre in ways that are just astonishing. So when I was invited to introduce him, I was just in paroxysms of joy. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Approaching Zanzibar: The genesis
	Approaching Zanzibar was very much thinking about my own mortality. I think I had just turned fifty, which seemed appalling. But then people say, “Think of the alternative,” so it’s not so appalling. And again I was looking for an artist who is into transformation and transcendence. I’ve always been very taken with Christo, with the site-specific artists and the earth artists, and so I created a sort of Christo-like character who the family is going to visit…Actually now that I think of it, my Aunt was not ill at that time, my Aunt Mattie, my mother’s sister. And then she became ill in the late 80’s and, in fact, my brother and I would go and visit her, and that was always a little scary – you know, how would we find her? And as a child I remember being suddenly aware of my own mortality at about the age of seven--that at some point I would cease to exist for ever and ever and ever and ever. And I remember just being terrified and my father having to comfort me. And so I wanted to put that fear of death not into somebody my age but into a child, because I had felt it so strongly as a child. And somehow, you know, by placing it in her instead of me, it gave me a certain amount of freedom artistically to really go the full nine yards in terms of exploring just how panic stricken she gets, and that a child wouldn’t have the censors that an adult would have in terms of expressing herself. Because I was sort of the invisible child in our family – I have an older brother who is a marvel and remarkably handsome and all of that. And so, because I was always an eclipse, I took that same pattern again. But I was determined to give Pony her moment, which was a moment I never had, but I think that’s why we sit down and write a play, to give…you know that she was the one that was most terrified of confronting this aged aunt who was dying of cancer, and she’d hear bits of her parents talking about, “Well she has a wig, and her teeth are gone,” so that Pony was so afraid that Olivia would just fall on her, and she would be lying under this decaying hulk. And instead I have Olivia be the only one who can really see her. And that was just a huge gift for me, to make that leap in terms of my imagination, because it never quite happened in real life, but in my imagination suddenly Pony is recognized, and you get the feeling that Olivia is passing the torch, and that Pony is going to become an artist. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Approaching Zanzibar: Charting a trip
	We never went on a family trip. It’s all made up. And what I did was I joined A.A. because I don’t…you know we don’t even own a car, and I said to the man, “I’m writing a play about a man who goes from Hastings on the Hudson to Taos, New Mexico. Would you chart their journey for me, because I don’t know how they would go?” By the end of our session together, he was so into it he was saying, “Well I think they’d really enjoy the Smoky Mountains, and they certainly wouldn’t want to miss…” and by the end, they were real to him. And so he gave me the trip. He gave me all of the stops they would rest at. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

One Shoe Off
	Sinking into the ground and vegetation has taken root and there are trees in the living room and mushrooms growing up the staircase and cauliflower under the chairs. And everything is sort of at a tilt – saplings growing in the corners. Yeah, that’s my recurring nightmare, that we’re back in Kinderhook in this country house that is falling into the ground, and I’m beside myself that we’re back there, and I say, “How did this happen?” I have it at least once a week. And that’s where One Shoe Off came from, because I wanted to exorcise that fear. Because I grew up in New York, you know going to the Metropolitan Museum as a child, and then I wanted my children to grow up here and to have all the riches of the city at their feet. So to be…I mean I just don’t get it. Now that’s the rage, upstate New York, and everyone has summer houses. I would pay not to go to a summer house in upstate New York. One Shoe Off is very much about living in Upstate New York – that kind of isolation and panic. There was a crop duster who lived behind us, and I remember one morning seeing his wife riding bareback in her nightgown at six in the morning, trying to get away. You know, bareback in her nightie – not on the roads but just going across the fields with her hair streaming behind her. And then I remember their barn burned down one year. Oh man, it’s a whole other world. Yeah, I’m very fond of that play and because it didn’t succeed – you know you always love the misshapen ones. I’ve always had a real fondness for that play. And in fact, Birth and After Birth, One Shoe Off and Rembrandt’s Gift are essentially about the same couple. We follow them in like twenty or thirty year intervals, but it’s the same couple. Someday somebody will write a learned paper about that. They will figure that out. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Pride’s Crossing
	Mabel, in Pride’s Crossing, was very closely modeled after my Aunt Mattie, the one who actually died in the course of that production. However, Mattie never swam the English Channel, Mattie never stood up to her mother, Mattie never married, Mattie never had an English lover, Mattie never had children. Her life was sort of spent in dark corners brooding and loving her nephews and nieces, and I wanted to write a happier story for her. So that play was very much an homage to her and to that generation of young women who grew up in Boston who didn’t have a prayer, who were just trapped. I just wanted to free her. And I’d tell her about it in the nursing home, and she’d get very confused. “But Tina, I never swam. What did you say? The Channel? I don’t understand.” And she didn’t understand, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to… She had a tremendous…the thing about old ladies is they have a tremendous capacity for rage, but they also have a tremendous capacity for tenderness. And I’d never really seen that on the stage, and I very much wanted to explore it and see how Mattie would lash out if she didn’t get her way. I just thought, ooh that would be so exhilarating to see on stage. The tender moments…and again when she’s with the child. Whenever you see a little girl on the stage, a little ten-year-old girl, it’s always me. You know, it’s my disguise. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Translating Ionesco
	Well a translation means that you deal with every word, and that you don’t take over, that you try to remain truthful to the rhythm, the poetry, the intention, the meaning of the language. An adaptation is something that happens when… people who adapt tend not to know the language that they are adapting from, and they have somebody give them a literal translation and they boogey over it. But with Ionesco, because I consider this a modern masterpiece, there was no way I would ever agree to do an adaptation. So my job was to…I mean my job was very difficult, because the play is very funny in French, because French is a such a funny language, because of how fast it’s spoken, and how chewy it is, and I don’t know how the French get into it in a way that English people don’t when they speak. When I took a group of Columbia play writing students to a bilingual production of the play which was done first in French and then ten minutes later, the same cast turned around and did it in English, they vastly preferred it in French, though none of them spoke a word of French. So, my job was to somehow mime the delirium of the French, in English, which, as I say in my little program note--when Ionesco writes pure gibberish, rather than translating literally, which, you know the present translators tend to do, so that even though the French gibberish becomes even more meaningless if it becomes English, because all of the rhyming and punning disappears. So when it was just pure gibberish, I just tossed out the French and substituted, you know, likeminded English gibberish that people like the Martins and the Smiths would spout. You know, why would they make jokes about French cultural icons if the play takes place in Britain? So for those passages, I realized that I had to become Ionesco, which was a marvelous experience. Peeling off my tall, WASPY skin and digging out the rolly-polly Romanian inside. And otherwise in the very familiar passages that we all love, it was just about trying to sort of make it as airborne as I could, and also I wanted there to be a real rhythm, because I feel that so many of the present translations are labored and truncated and abortive, and more than anything I wanted it to flow. It was hard, it was very hard. People say, “Oh, you must speak French so well.” And I say, “Well I do speak French pretty well, but I speak English a lot better.” And in the end it’s all about how well you handle the language you’re translating into. So that was the challenge, was to make it airborne. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Luncheon on the Grass: End of life
	Well this is my next play, the one I’m working on. It takes place in a nursing home. No, I’m very…although I’m taking, as usual, a rather elegiac stance with it, because I remember when my father was dying and when my Aunt Mattie was dying, there’s that transparency at the end of the departing soul. There’s something very airborne and transcendent that gives those of us who are still around a certain amount of hope. And I’m very interested in those last moments of transparency, and that’s something that I want to write about. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Luncheon in the Grass: Escaping
	I’ve been working on a play set in a nursing home. Again, this was sort of inspired by my Aunt Mattie who was at the Baptist Home for the Aged. She spent all of her life in Massachusetts, but when she became really sort of ill and immobile, my brother wanted to move her to a nursing home actually that turned out to be right next door to where he lived in Riverdale. And so we moved her to this home that was literally next door, so that he could come and feed her every other day or every day and just keep an eye on her. And it was called The Baptist Home. And she was there for four years, and while she was there, The Baptist Home was sold to the Hebrew Home for the Aged, and the playwright in me went, “Oh Boy!” Imagine if my WASPY, unhappy, depressed, mute Aunt Mattie born and raised in Boston got this ebullient, fun-loving Jewish roommate, and they had to make a peace together and live together. And the Jewish roommate would come, all of her family would come – tons of relatives and friends eating and laughing and telling stories – and the WASPY one has one miserable son, and I just thought, “I’ve got to write this.” So it is about old age, and it is about this friendship, and also when my father was very ill at Manhattan Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, he tried to escape. And once, when I was in the hospital with pneumonia, I tried to escape. I think there’s a very powerful impulse, particularly in an old-age home, to get out. And so the WASPY one has had this extraordinary idea of this voyage she wants to make, and you hear that from the very beginning of the play. But she’s losing her sight, so she needs to have somebody come with her. So she convinces her roommate who’s a little “ga-ga,” and the roommate doesn’t really know where they’re going, but they stage the escape. And it’s thrilling. They get out and they have this incredible adventure. So again, it’s me facing my own mortality, but trying to hope that maybe I won’t be stuck in a wheelchair crying, “Help, help.” That maybe I’ll be able to get on an ocean liner and take off to more verdant shores. You know, it’s a wish. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Cadence & chaos
	I think because as a child we were religiously taken to the Marx Brothers movies. You know, during the week things were fairly sober, but once we filed into the Trans-Lux, we had license to give ourselves over to the mayhem. And I remember, I mean, both parents, laughing so hard that a few times we were ejected from the theater, because we made such a ruckus. And so a message was made very clear to me that you can read your poetry and study your novels and read Shakespeare during the week, but it was fine to laugh yourself liquid at Harpo jumping into that Lemonade vat and jumping up and down into it. The fact that my parents laughed louder than anybody else, like in the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, you know I made note of that, and I realized, “Oh, okay. Perhaps the point is to live somewhat of a cadenced life, but then to let all hell break out when you feel the urge to do that.” My father, aside from taking me to readings of E.E. Cummings, took me to Vaudeville – we’d go the Palace and see the roller skating midgets and the fat ladies singing songs. You know, I think he was able to sort of straddle both worlds. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Parents reactions to plays
	My mother died suddenly of a stroke during the production of Museum at the Los Angeles Actor’s Theater. And then Papp remounted it at the Public. And my father died nine months after my mother, so he never saw it, but he knew that it was being produced. I mean they did see The Nest (laughs) where Jill Clayburgh took off all her clothes. Before the reviews came out, they loved it, because they loved the delirium of it, and they were thrilled. And then the reviews came out which were, you know, toxic. And suddenly they did this about-face, and it was terribly upsetting to me. And my mother said, “How could you have written that?” and “We were there with friends from the country, and it was so embarrassing, and you’ve embarrassed us.” And I was really stunned at how suddenly they’d changed their tune. It made a huge impression on me. You know they say that all art is revenge in some way. I suppose, partly because of that reaction, that so much of… I mean in fact I did come from a very high-powered household, but I never was very successful. I was a bad student. I was dreamy. I did terribly on the college boards. I didn’t do well in school. I was just sort of this lost soul wandering around, and I didn’t achieve very much. So, I think that the writing of the plays became a way for me to find a safe-haven to invent another world where I could exercise my fancy and be safe and not have people laugh at me or judge me, so that writing became a real refuge. And also, was sort of able to fulfill my clown side. People ask how would my parents have reacted to Painting Churches? And I think they would have been appalled. They would have been appalled, my father particularly, to see any sort of mimicking of him, of a man like him losing control – you know of losing his wits and of soiling himself and of being lost. And the fight between Fanny and Gardner – or I should say the fight when Fanny and Gardner are packing up their belongings, and they have that fight with Mags. I think they would have been deeply distressed to see that much anguish on stage. But I think more than anything they would have been distressed by the sight of a father figure becoming as sort of helpless as Gardner did. No I think that… they would have been appalled. They would have been appalled. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

The limits of language
	One of the things as a playwright I’m fascinated about – the limits of language. And I remember when I first read about Children of a Lesser God coming to Broadway, the love affair between a man and a deaf woman, and I thought, “Oh, this can’t fail.” Because I knew there would be moments when the man would try to get the woman to make a sound, and that it would be excruciating. And it seems to me that plays are ultimately about the attempts that people make to communicate. That plays are ultimately about people’s valor as they try to get through to one another in probably desperate circumstances. One of the exercises that I gave my students--at the first class I give them these dizzy ten minute exercises--and I think one of the best ones I ever designed was to write a ten minute play in which the following people go through an experience together that changes them forever. And the people are: an opera singer, a ventriloquist, and a deaf child. And, you know the class gets this, and they think, “Oh Tina’s flipped her lid once again.” But little do they know that what this exercise is about is about how these unlikely people find some common language with each other. And I love sort of binding my hands as a playwright and not being able to use language or having to use too much language or a foreign language, because it tests how clever and resourceful the players can be, the characters can be in terms of getting through to one another. So, that’s why you see deaf characters in my work. I know exactly what I’m doing. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Baroque music
	I do have a passion for Baroque music. I don’t know where that came from, but Bach keyboard works, I have to be hospitalized (laughs). I went through a very severe Glenn Gould phase for twenty-five years where when I was writing my plays all I listened to was Glenn Gould, and this was before CDs. And I would get Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier. I’d put on the first side, one record that had maybe twenty preludes on it. And I would put it on repeat, and I would play it for four months, one side, the same side five hours a day. And then after four months, I would flip it to the other side. And I went through Gould’s entire Bach, what do you call it, discography – whatever the word is – that way. You know, just endlessly. Because I think of his joy. I mean that’s what it was about him, the joy, the ecstasy of his playing. It was just… And then suddenly, after twenty-five years, something happened, and I just couldn’t take it anymore and had meltdown. And poor Norman, you know, tried to work. He works in the bedroom, and I work in the dining room. But I, you know, I’d shut the doors. But he would hear residual – all of that fugal banging. And then I had this meltdown, and then I veered into Alfred Brendel doing Mozart piano concertos. And then, about five years ago, I went to see the French and English Suites played by Andras Schiff. And Schiff…where Gould plays like a drowning man, Schiff has this extraordinary transparency. And then I became a Schiff groupie. And, you know, the same thing happened, and now I play his recordings obsessively. That’s a huge part of my makeup, and there are those who are sensitive to my work who realize that there is hopefully a musicality about it in terms of the language and the rhythm. And it all comes from, you know, Baroque music. I’m just gone. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Extravagance and excess
	And I feel that one’s inventive plays tend to be the most successful. We go to the theater to go on a journey, it seems to me, and why make theater like television? Isn’t the point to exhibit a little extravagance, both in terms of what you look at, in terms of the language, in terms of the trials that characters go through? I’ve always felt that was my mandate, was to explore what’s extravagant. And that’s why I do the theater as opposed to film or television. It doesn’t mean excess necessarily. There’s a difference I think between extravagance and excess. I had a little piece in the EST Marathon two seasons ago, in which Ophelia suddenly pops up in a whirlpool at a New York Health Club, and so we needed the illusion of a working whirlpool and this drenched Elizabethan character to emerge with all of her flowers and her wilted dress, coming out of the whirlpool, and the designers did it. It was awesome! And with sound effects. And the audience had a blast. That’s the point, it seems to me. ¹ 56K (Dial-up) ¹ 100K (Broadband) Top of Page

Christo
	It’s so much like the theater, that there’s this enormous preparation that goes into all of his wrappings and, you know, 80% of what he does is about getting permission and going to these town meetings and convincing people and showing drawings and trying to twist arms. And then there’s this enormous effort of the actual wrapping itself. And he finances all of these projects himself, and he pays his workers, and he hires thousands of people to help him – whatever the project is. So it will take, I don’t know, however long it takes to wrap whatever it is that he’s wrapping. You know, several weeks. It’s up for two weeks, and then it’s dismantled, and I find that very moving and very powerful, because it’s so much like the theater – that, you know, it takes me two years to write a play, all the rewrites and then rehearsals and then the rewriting, and finally we get it up on its feet, and it runs for X number of weeks, and then it’s dismantled. So, it’s very much the same process. But also, with Christo, the fact that he conceals objects, but in the concealing he reveals them, and it’s this sort of delicate frisson between what is revealed and what is concealed and how the two are so dependent on one another.