Painting Churches
by Tina Howe

Directed and Designed
by Lon Winston

PAINTING CHURCHES -- Affirms TRTC Professionalism

By Judy King - Valley Journal staff writer

So adept is the casting and performance in the Thunder River Theatre Company’s production of Tina Howe’s family drama “Painting Churches,” that the play could have been written with Bonnie Cobb, Valerie Haugen and Richard Lyon in mind. The company’s director, Lon Winston, consistently finds the highest quality plays with gems of parts for the members of a small and finely tuned troupe whose performances would do credit to a repertory theatre in any major city.

Margaret (Mags) Church, a promising portrait painter at last beginning to reap attention in the New York art world, returns to the Boston home of her rapidly aging parents with the ostensible agenda of helping them pack up for the permanent move to their Cape Cod cottage. Her more profound purpose is to render on canvas this pair whose eccentricities are deepening with age.

The play focuses on two intertwined themes an artistic daughter striving for recognition from a narcissistic mother, a dynamic presenting one of the most problematic dyads in family life; and an uncommon mind slipping into a twilight of consciousness. Poet laureate Garland Church is losing his memory and his hold on events unfolding around him while his vain wife, the voluble Fanny, struggles to care for a husband who has ceased to be a companion and become a responsibility. Thrift shop savvy Fanny buys designer hats for pennies and keeps the couple going with cocktail hours, chatter about the past and an almost unwavering verve.

When Fanny’s refusal to recall the past in any but glowing colors is challenged by Mag’s need for confrontation and hope for catharsis, facades on both sides of the generational divide are laid aside to reveal festering hurts and unresolved conflicts.

Bonnie Cobb brings to the Fanny Church role her characteristic unflagging stamina, flair for farce, and ability to wrest sympathy from the comedic and comedy from pathos. Fanny is a richly developed and multi-faceted character and Cobb plays each facet to the hilt, sweeping the stage with flamboyant gestures, a verbal stream of frivolities studded with sharp insights, and ultimate valor.

The part of Mags poses a challenge to which Valerie Haugen rises with admirable grace. Talented and tormented by the need for a parental recognition that eludes her, Mags, even in caustic or enraged tirades about past injustices, is low key, lacking her mother’s zest for dominating the moment. Much of the emotion Mags experiences as she helps her parents pack up the family’s past while struggling with her artistic interpretation of them is played out on her face rather than in words. Haugen’s nuanced facial expressions clearly reveal the subtle variations in Mag’s feelings.

With equal skill, Richard Lyon portrays a powerful mind in frightening decline, the distinguished poet’s flashes of past brilliance shimmering through a dimming present. Lyon’s Garland Church brims with an energy that once went into creating celebrated poems and is now diverted to coping with the humiliations of his daily life. Wavering between Garland’s innate good nature and outbursts of frustration, Lyon gives a moving performance. Howe’s script manages to avoid the maudlin, mining a comic vein without shirking from the grim realities, and this dynamic production is paced accordingly. The audience remains engrossed throughout and is deeply touched as Mags moves out of the shadows cast by her father’s prominence and her mother’s disparagement into her own light while her parents fortify themselves for a final chapter in which they can hope to go gallantly into that good night.

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