Slow-moving disintegration has taken hold of the farmhouse in rural upstate New York. The house sinks into the ground and rooms drift into each other, leaving moldings, doorjambs and window frames stranded. Grass, weeds and shrubbery creep in; full-grown trees take root in the corners, giving the place the look of a surreal ruin.
Playwright Tina Howe calls the tottering house her most frightening set. And the play, One Shoe Off, reflects a burgeoning anxiety.
“It was informed by a real sense of catastrophe,” she says. “The house is a metaphor for instability. The boom of the ’80s is over. There’s very little you can count on anymore not health, jobs, family ties.”
One Shoe Off opened in April with a Second Stage production at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York. It is Howe’s first play since Approaching Zanzibar in 1989, and is a departure from the lyrical style and agitated monologues that have become her hallmark.
People at wit’s end
“The difference is that I’m writing about people who are panic-stricken,” she says, sitting on a sofa in her sunny apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “The early drafts had too much language. When people are overwrought and at wit’s end, they actually use fewer words. I had to find a new style that matched that sense of catastrophe.”
The play brings together five people two married couples and a male friend of the hosts for a disastrous dinner party. In an attempt to capture the despair of people living in a world where nothing is certain, Howe has returned to absurdism (which she prefers to call “metaphysical farce”) of early plays like Birth and After Birth and Museum. A decade ago, after feeling that her love of the exotic was dooming her plays, Howe intentionally controlled her absurdist desires and in 1983 wrote the more straightforward Painting Churches, her most successful play. But to be true to the experience of the ’90s, she says she needed a larger-than-life approach.
“I thought, ‘Why not go for broke and go back to what I always loved most?'” she says. “I had a deep conviction that this was the appropriate style to be writing in. The desperation of the style matches the message.” Artistic director Carole Rothman, who is at the helm of her fourth Tina Howe play, says the challenge of One Shoe Off is to find the right balance between comedy and despair.
“She uses language to create a special world in her plays,” Rothman says. “They are eminently actable and directable. This one is very honed-down and clearly focused, and the five characters are drawn in depth.”
One Shoe Off’s five characters are played by Mary Beth Hurt, Jeffrey DeMunn, Daniel Gerroll, Jennifer Tilly and Brian Kerwin; Heidi Landesman designed the fecund set, her third for a Howe play. Unlike Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which also features two couples at a disastrous social gathering, the battle in One Shoe Off is not between the sexes; it is more a fight for commitment in the face of panic and sexual longing. “My characters are not simply angry,” Howe says, “they’re more broken.”
Greenhouse gone mad
And they are being overtaken by trees, shrubs, plants and leaves. “How do you get them to grow indoors?”, asks Tate, an editor invited for dinner. “How do you get to grow them outdoors?!” retorts Leonard, the out-of-work actor who’s playing host. In one comic scene, Leonard’s wife Dinah struggles into the room with a gigantic vat of salad which she says she picked that morning “from inside the coat closet, it’s like a greenhouse gone mad–mushrooms nestling in the mittens, avocados blooming in the galoshes, broccoli sprouting out the umbrellas…. A wave of vegetable lust is surging through the house, it keeps us awake at night…. Green beans quickening, okra stiffening, zucchini swelling…. Cabbage writhing, endive panting, hearts of palm ululating under the bed.”
As in the past, Howe first imagined the set and then wrote the play. The invasive, vegetative setting sprang from a recurring nightmare she has had for the past several years. In it Howe relives the sense of isolation and claustrophobia she felt living in upstate New York while her husband was a professor at a state university and she was at home with two small children.
“The people I admire most in literature and music are the stylists like Virginia Woolf and Bach,” the playwright says, citing Woolf’s idea that rhythm is everything. “I’m addicted to baroque music and it seeps into my work.”
Despite the shift away from monologues, Howe calls One Shoe Off “quintessential me a culmination. It’s less artful than my other plays, but it’s about a more urgent subject. The pain is very raw.”
