Tina Howe obit

 

Tina Howe, Tony-Nominated ‘Coastal Disturbances’ Playwright, Dies at 85

She also was behind 'Painting Churches' and 'Pride’s Crossing,' both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

She was not on the list.

Tina Howe, the Tony-nominated playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist known for Coastal Disturbances, Painting Churches and Pride’s Crossing, has died. She was 85.

Howe died Monday at NewYork Presbyterian Allen Hospital after a short illness due to complications from a hip fracture sustained in a recent fall, her longtime agent, Patrick Herold, announced.

Her most produced plays, which also included Birth and After Birth, Museum, The Art of Dining and Approaching Zanzibar, premiered at the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Second Stage, The Old Globe, Lincoln Center Theater, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Atlantic Theater Company and Primary Stage and were translated and produced abroad.

Howe’s New York breakthrough came in 1981 with the production of Painting Churches at Second Stage. The play earned Howe an Obie Award for best new American play, then moved to Broadway in 1983 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Howe reunited with Second Stage in 1986 for a production of Coastal Disturbances. That play, starring Annette Bening and Tim Daly, moved to Broadway in May 1987 and collected the Outer Critics Circle Award for best play, with Howe landing a Tony nomination.

In 1997, Lincoln Center Theater produced the New York premiere of Pride’s Crossing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater following its original run at the Old Globe. The play was a 1998 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and went on to win the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award for best play.

She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2017.

Born in New York on Nov. 21, 1937, Howe attended Sarah Lawrence College, Teacher’s College at Columbia University and Chicago Teachers College and studied philosophy at Sorbonne University in Paris.

Her first full-length play to receive a professional production was The Nest, which premiered off-Broadway at the Mercury Theater in April 1970.

Her many accolades during her four-decade career also included a Rockefeller Grant, two N.E.A. Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Sidney Kingsley Award, the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre, a Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement and, most recently, PEN’s Master American Playwright award in 2015.

Her works can be read in numerous anthologies as well as in Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe and Birth and After Birth and Other Plays: A Marriage Cycle.

Her publications include her translations of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, plus Shrinking Violets and Towering Tiger Lilies: Seven Brief Plays about Women in Distress. Her last collection of short one-act plays, Where Women Go, was published this year.

She also was the subject of the 2014 book Howe in an Hour, edited by Judith Barlow.

Howe served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990 and taught at NYU, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA and Hunter College. She launched the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting in 2010 as Playwright-in-Residence.

Survivors include her children, Eben and Dara; their respective spouses, Cate and Joshua; and three grandchildren. Her husband of 61 years, Norman Levy, died last year.