Event

Painting Churches

In Association with The Actors' Ensemble
With Ted Pugh*, Fern Sloan*, and Sandra Struthers*
*Member, Actors'Equity Association
Piano: Gili Melamed-Lev
Directed by David Anderson

A moving portrait that explores family ties, Painting Churches is filled with moments of bravado, mischief, and intimate memories.

"In ''Painting Churches,'' her beautifully written play (...), Tina Howe has dramatized an illuminating connection between life and art. Miss Howe believes that, in life, perspective can be everything: only with age and experience and luck can children finally see their parents clearly and whole, in the mature light that reveals all. The same, of course, can be true of the relationship of artists to their material. An artist often returns to the same subject again and again, and with time, the perspective keeps changing. Lucky artists eventually reach that state of wisdom or grace where their vision is complete. For the less fortunate, whether in life or art, the grand design remains stubbornly, even tragically, out of reach.

Miss Howe explores this connection by telling a deceptively simple story. ''Painting Churches'' is about what happens when Mags Church, a young New York artist about to have her first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, returns home to Boston to paint a portrait of her aged, patrician parents, Gardner and Fanny. The play ends when Mags completes her painting, on the day her parents move out of their Beacon Hill mansion to a cottage on Cape Cod. (...)"

(From a Review by Frank Rich)