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Description
Just as much as other Tina Howe plays, Painting Churches, from beginning to end, echoes the themes of a novelist Virginia Woolf, of whom Howe has long declared herself an admirer (Barlow 171). In fact, in Painting Churches, Howe expands Woolfian themes considerably by making Woolfian metaphor clusters out of apparently realistic details. She thus broadens our sense of how omnipresent to humanity is a concern, such as that which Woolf voices, about the scary flux of human experience. For instance, Howe turns into symbols of flux the lighting effects within Impressionist painting and the traumatic onsets, for human beings, of decayed bodily health--especially (through such conditions as Alzheimer's disease) the degeneration of human memory functions. In the end, though, the play's great central theme is not degeneration but, rather, endurance. These Churches paint, for readers, the lasting power of love.
Although Virginia Woolf and Tina Howe both pay much attention to death, which marks the ultimate dissolution of radiant consciousness, their work also regularly enshrines moments of especially sparkling life. Both writers extol the most dazzling of living perceptions, knowing, however, how such experiential glories must inevitably dissolve--mixing into muddier streams of still-living, yet already dying consciousness. At heart, Woolf and Howe concentrate intensely on both the potential bliss and the definite brevity of any "present moment" (Woolf "The Moment: Summer's Night" 3).
For example, in Woolf's British lyrical narrative To the Lighthouse, the character Mrs. Ramsay rejoices when she achieves, at a dinner party, a beautifully coherent moment of calm serenity:
Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.... (146-147; emphasis mine)
Unfortunately, however, the same vital woman must admit, as her precious festal event concludes later that evening, that, even in her protected dining room,
{i}t was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (167-168)
In an odd but definite variation upon the worries over flux voiced by Woolf's Mrs.... |
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