User:Jmiller134/TinaHowe

Tina Howe (born November 21, 1937) is an American Playwright. She is best known for plays such as Painting Churches and Coastal Disturbances. Her works have won numerous awards, one which includes the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play (Pride’s Crossing), and the same play was the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist. Coastal Disturbances was also nominated for the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play.

Early and Family Life

Howe was born to Quincy Howe, a CBS news commentator, and Mary Post Howe, a shy artist who loved to find the humor in things. Howe’s mother, father, and grandmother were essential to why Howe is the writer she is today. In an interview with Mike Wood, Howe recounts how her family’s focus was on reading and writing. Howe says that “ 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?”' Her father’s side of the family consisted of a grandfather, Mark DeWolfe Howe, who was a poet and lived to be 96; and an uncle, Mark Howe, who was a law professor at Harvard. (Howe) Her grandfather grew up around the Civil War and “was a man of letters.” He passed his love of literature on to his sons and daughters, and they did the same. Howe remembers a time when she was ill with hepatitis, and her father visited her everyday in the hospital, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses to her during his lunch break.

Instead of using words, Howe’s mother expressed herself with the use of painting and miniatures as her mediums. She had an interest in collecting skeletal remains of small animals and other peculiar objects. “ . . . 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 . . .”

Howe’s grandmother was an avid reader, but one of the most prominent memories Howe has of her is listening to her and being by her side as she played the piano. Recounted by Howe as a “terrible snob,” her grandmother inspired her to write some of the subject matter in Pride’s Crossing.

Career

Tina Howe has been writing for the stage for over thirty years, with some of her better known works being The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Approaching Zanzibar, One Shoe Off, and Pride’s Crossing.

Howe graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1959, where she wrote her first play. She spent a year in Paris, where she continued to write, and after returning she earned her teaching credentials at Columbia Teacher’s College and Chicago Teachers College. She started teaching high school in Monona Grove, Wisconsin, and then in Bath, Maine, which is where she says she learned her craft through running the drama department, a position she agreed to take on the terms that only her plays would be produced. Her first professionally produced play was The Nest in 1970.

Howe is noted as an innovative and experimental writer, with a strong affinity for absurdism, exploring the absurd in a more realistic setting. Her play Painting Churches is one of her most critically successful works to date, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Off-Broadway play in 1984. It was also produced by PBS’ American Playhouse series in 1986. She received a Tony Award for Coastal Disturbances in 1987, and an Obie award in 1983 for distinguished playwriting.

Howe has had plays produced around the country, as well as abroad. She has had plays premier in venues such as the Los Angeles Actor’s Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the Second Stage. She has received a Rockefeller Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and letters award in literature, as well as receiving two honorary degrees.

Currently, Tina Howe spends most of her time in New York City. She has served as a visiting professor at Hunter College since 1990, and an adjunct professor at New York University since 1983,as well as the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of South Tennessee. She has served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990.

Personal Life

Tina Howe is married to historian Norman Levy. They have two children. She views her pregnancy as a wonderful time in her life. She never even considered motherhood until she was 35 years old.

Her parents' reactions to her plays have been mixed. Her mother died suddenly of a stroke during the production of Museum at the Los Angeles Actor's Theatre. Her father died nine months after that.

She has a passion for swimming. She swam laps before discovering she had a love for water aerobics. She also has a passion for Baroque music. She went through a 25 year phase in which she would write her plays while listening only to pianist Glenn Gould.

Plays

• Museum (1976)
• The Art of Dining (1979)
• Painting Churches (1983)
• Coastal Disturbances (1986)
• Approaching Zanzibar(1989)
• One Shoe Off (1993)
• Pride's Crossing (1997)
• Rembrandt's Gift (2002)
• The Bald Soprano (English translation of Eugène Ionesco, 2004)
• The Lesson (English translation of Eugène Ionesco, 2004)
• Birth and After Birth (2006)
• Chasing Manet (2009)

Awards and Nominations

• 1983 Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting (winner)
• 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Painting Churches (finalist)
• 1984 Rockefeller Grant for Distinguished Playwriting (winner)
• 1987 Tony Award Best Play Coastal Disturbances (nominee)
• 1990 Guggenheim Fellowship(winner)
• 1993 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (winner)
• 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Pride's Crossing (finalist)
• 1998 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play (winner)
• 1998 MAdge Evans & Sidney S. Kingsley Award (winner)
• 2005 William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater (winner)