The Art of Dining
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Complex, original female characters also make Howe a significant figure in the landscape of contemporary American theater: she explores women’s obsessions, their sensuality, their intelligence and aesthetics with a gutsy bravado often missing in plays by men. Women artists are fixtures in Howe’s work, from Mags, the successful New York-based artist in Painting Churches who returns to Boston to paint her aging parents’ portraits, to Agnes Vaag in Museum (who never actually appears but is exalted and gossiped about by other women), an artist who digs in the woods to find material for her striking primal art. These women seem to be in contact with a force deeper and richer than what occupies the psyche’s surface, and their creative powers enable them to touch the aching, inner void all the characters are yearning to fill.
In The Art of Dining, currently running at Footsteps Theatre, the central artist is Ellen, chef and co-owner of the Golden Carousel, a French restaurant, and her medium is food. What better way for Howe to explore the dynamic between our fundamental need for nourishment and the psychological and social meanings we give the act of eating? Setting her play in the kitchen and dining room of the Golden Carousel, Howe introduces us to Ellen and her husband Cal–a lawyer who gave up his practice to be headwaiter–and shows us the tension between the preparing of food and its artful presentation. Exploring the diners’ hopes, expectations, and fears, Howe creates dialogue akin to a musical score in its rhythms, layering, climaxes, and silences, making an evening at a restaurant a sort of symphony of guilt and pleasure, joy and pain.
The exchanges between reclusive short-story writer Elizabeth Barrow Colt and the hearty, healthy publisher she meets for dinner, David Oslow, are based on respectful listening: here some of Howe’s most powerful dialogue is given the attention it deserves. Aimee Bruneau is intensely effective as Barrow Colt, taking us through the character’s dramatic transformation in a dignified, prudent New England manner appropriate to Howe. Revealing to Oslow the reason she doesn’t eat through vivid memories of her childhood dinners, Bruneau’s Barrow Colt is never melodramatic, touching her pain with a brave honesty. When Oslow tells her she has beautiful eyes, it truly turns her life upside down. It is in these offhand moments that Howe recalls Chekhov: even the most mundane incident has the potential to change our existence. Barrow Colt is another of Howe’s female artists who start to overcome their anguish by looking it in the face; and the other, more repressed characters are clearly moved by her strength.
