Tina Howe

American playwright (1937–2023)

Mabel Davis "Tina" Howe (November 21, 1937 – August 28, 2023) was an American playwright. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Howe's best known works include Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, and Pride's Crossing. Her plays won numerous awards, including the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play for Pride's Crossing, which was also a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Coastal Disturbances was nominated for the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play.

Mabel Davis Howe was born in Manhattan on November 21, 1937. Howe came from a literary family. Her grandfather, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, published over 50 books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1925. Her father Quincy Howe wrote and broadcast the evening news on CBS Radio from 1942 to 1947, and then on ABC television. He was the author of the three volume history, A World History of Our Own Times. Her uncle, Mark DeWolfe Howe, taught constitutional law at Harvard Law School and was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s law clerk and biographer. Her aunt, Helen Howe, was a successful monologist and novelist. Howe was called Tina since her childhood, so when she was eighteen, she changed her name from Mabel Howe to Tina Howe. When Howe was ill with hepatitis, her father visited her every day in the hospital, reading James Joyce's Ulysses to her during his lunch break. Howe graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in 1959. As an undergraduate, she wrote her first play, Closing Time; her classmate, Jane Alexander, later directed and acted in it. After graduation, she and Alexander traveled to Europe; Alexander to act and study mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and Howe to study philosophy at Sorbonne University and write. When Howe saw Eugène Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve at the Théâtre de la Huchette, "It changed my life", she said. "It was like a bolt of lightning going through my head." Following her return from Europe, Howe did graduate work at Columbia University Teacher's College and Chicago Teachers College. She started teaching high school in Monona Grove, Wisconsin, while her husband (teacher and writer Norman Levy) was doing graduate work and then in Bath, Maine, which is where she said she learned her craft through running the school's drama department, a position she agreed to take if they would produce her plays.

Literary critic and novelist C. W. E. Bigsby wrote that "art is plainly a central point of reference" for Howe, noting those themes in Painting Churches and Coastal Disturbances, and added that "food and consumption" are also important themes in her work. In his book Contemporary American Playwrights, Bigsby wrote that she had a "commitment to experimentation" and quotes Howe as saying said that she is "firmly entrenched in the Absurdist tradition." Frank Rich, in his New York Times review of Painting Churches commented that the play "is in the dreamiest impressionistic spirit." The Variety reviewer of Painting Churches also noted that the play is a "group portrait painted in a soft, impressionistic style." The CurtainUp reviewer of Coastal Disturbances wrote of Howe's work: "Like all of Howe's work, the play's charm stems from its quirky characters. In this case joie de vie, despair, love, lust, anger and fear come and go like the waves hitting the shore in foamy bursts or gentle ripples." Writing in the Sarah Lawrence Magazine, Celia McGerr Regan described Howe's authorial voice: "Howe developed a voice that has been variously described as farcical and absurd, impressionistic and airy, graceful and perceptive, lyric and literate, vivid and language driven, whimsical and demented. Odd things happen in the face of the recognizable: Trees grow up inside and through a New York State farmhouse (One Shoe Off) "

Ben Brantley in reviewing Birth and After Birth for The New York Times, observed "The suggestion is of a natural world that thwarts and ultimately devours the ambitions and pretensions of the civilized. This is a theme that Ms. Howe would develop in later works, sometimes artfully (Coastal Disturbances), sometimes clumsily (One Shoe Off), but always in a style that was distinctively her own." Howe noted about her time in Paris: "The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing The Bald Soprano by Ionesco. That exploded me all over the place." Ionesco, Beckett and Pirandello continued to be her heroes. Howe was a great admirer of Glenn Gould, saying, "I write my plays to Glenn Gould. I cook the kids' spaghetti dinners to Glenn Gould. I pay the bills to Glenn Gould."

Howe had taught master classes at New York University, UCLA, Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon. (Annie Baker has taken the position formerly held by Howe.) Howe was a member of the council of the Dramatists Guild of America from 1990. Several of her works can be read in the volumes Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe and Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays. Her papers are held by the Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library.

Howe was married to historian Norman Levy from 1961 until his death in 2022. The couple had two children, and lived in the Bronx after years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Howe received a Rockefeller Grant (1983), two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship (1990), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1993). and Honoris causa, Doctor of Letters from Bowdoin College (1998). In 2007 she received the Horton Foote Award, presented at the Baylor University Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival. Howe was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame for 2017. At the ceremony in November 2017 at the Gershwin Theatre, she was introduced by her long time friend Jane Alexander, who said "She has passion, wit and absurdity [her plays are an] operatic dive into the depths She writes as no one else does about women "