Tina Howe, whose plays could be overproductions or little gems of humor, heartache and resilience in the lives of her characters, especially the women, died Monday in Manhattan. He is 85.
His family said the cause was complications from a broken hip sustained in a recent fall.
Ms. Howe has twice been a finalist for Pulitzer Prize in dramafor “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. His “Coastal Disturbances” had a 350-performance run on Broadway in 1987 and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play.
In the preface to a 1984 collection of his plays “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches,” he described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of his output:
“They share an absorption in the production and consumption of art, an obsession with food, a tendency to veer into the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless penchant for the sight gag.”
In general, her plays have other characteristics: They have multidimensional female characters of a kind that were not often seen when she started in the 1970s. As he told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program “Women in the Theatre,” in those years many artistic directors were men who were only interested in plays where female characters were victims. It’s harder, he said, to get support for a play that features “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”
Some of his plays are large productions, such as “Museum,” which, set in the gallery of a major art museum, had a cast of nearly 50 when it premiered in 1976 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. The “Coastal Disturbances,” as described by Ms. Howe in the preface to a 1989 collection, takes place on “a beach complete with boiling ocean and 20 tons of sand.”
“Looks like I’m going out of my way to make it as difficult as possible,” he wrote of the gaming variety.
But he also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took his career to a new level when it premiered at Second Stage in Manhattan in 1983. The play has only three characters: a couple and their artist daughter, who as the play progresses paints a portrait of her parents, with facts about the family revealed as she goes about the task. It was described by Ms. Howe as a kind of reverse image of “Museum,” where the characters talk about art; in “Painting Churches,” the characters become art.
Frank Rich, who reviewed the production in The New York Times, used a line spoken by the father late in the play.
“‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he said, in a line of art criticism that might also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s lovely play,” Mr. Rich wrote.
After its Second Stage run, the production moved to another theater in Midtown and ran for several more months.
“Coastal Disturbances” also opened on Stage Two, in 1986, and it, too, drew raves. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathered on a beach, although this is the only premise.
“It’s really about the pain of love and the pain of love and the joy and the heartache and the joy,” Annette Bening, who played the lead role, a photographer named Holly who has an affair with a lifeguard, said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, he said, is a thinly veiled version of Ms. Howe himself, which means that he and Ms. Howe developed a bond.
“He was incredibly sharp and stubborn,” said Ms. Bening, “and his plays reflect all of that.”
Mr. Rich, reviewing “Beach Disturbances,” called it “a uniquely feminine creation, but its beautiful, secluded private beach amply illuminates the intimate scene shared by women and men .”
“Coastal Disturbances” showcased the talent of Ms. Howe for folly. In one scene, Ms. Bening is buried up to her neck in sand by a lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) while narrating a rather erotic fantasy involving anthropomorphized dolphins.
In the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Ms. Howe his passion for strange scenes.
“I came of age during the height of Absurdism when it was the fellas who shook the views of what was worthy of the stage – Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” he wrote. “Their artistry and bravery as they wrestle logic and language is hilarious, but where are their female counterparts, shivering at what we deserve? Since I’m a hopelessly unreformed feminist with no ax to grind, who better to take up the challenge than me?”
Mabel Davis Howe was born on Nov. 21, 1937, in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina from childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, said her son, Eben Levy.) Her father, an author, journalist and broadcast commentator, worked for CBS radio. and ABC television. His mother was an aspiring actress who exhibited on Long Island.
The films of the Marx Brothers are among the passions of Ms. Howe as a child and influenced his playwriting.
“The whole point is to keep piling excess upon excess,” he wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theater?”
While she was studying at Sarah Lawrence College, the actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Ms.’s first plays. Howe, the “Closing Time.” Ms. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.
“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing Ionesco’s ‘The Bald Soprano,'” he told The Times in 1983. “That blew me all over the place.”
She married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin as he completed his degrees. In 1967, when Mr. Levy teaching at the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), the couple moved to Kinderhook, NY, where Ms. Howe plays enthusiastically.
In 1970, his play “The Nest,” which he described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how cruel and tragic they are when they interact with men,” received a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. That the first sentence of Clive Barnes’ review in The Times didn’t kill his new career is a miracle.
“It is always rash to use superlatives,” wrote Mr. Barnes, “but it comes more forcefully to my mind that ‘The Nest,’ which boldly calls itself a play and even more boldly opened last night at Mercury Theater, should be on any reasonably short list of the worst plays I’ve ever seen.”
However, Ms. remained. Howe, who drew attention not only for “Museum” but also for “The Art of Dining” (which was performed at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 he won an Obie Award for his recent works. Many other awards followed.
Among his most successful plays after “Coastal Disturbances” was “Pride’s Crossing,” in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on his life. That piece was performed at Lincoln Center in 1997.
“Older women have a lot of power,” Ms. Howe said at the time. “There’s magic going on with them. A lot of times they’re out of this world; their thoughts are in neverland. But with the magic and the dreaming is the rage that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that kind of animal cry of self-preservation on stage.
André Bishop, working artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, remembers a playwright with a unique style.
“Tina is a deliciously idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of mischief infuses all of her work,” he said in a statement. “She is delightful, like the plays written in her unique voice.”
Ms. Howe and Mr. Levy lived in Manhattan in 1973 and recently lived in the Bronx. Mr. died Levy last year. In addition to her son, Ms. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.
In an Instagram post yesterday, playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe who was both a friend and a mentor.
“One of the last times I visited him,” wrote Ms. Ruhl, “she said: ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country.'”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.