Described as “…beautifully written…a theatrical family portrait that has the shimmer and depth of Renoir portraits…” by The New York Times, Tina Howe’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play is a provocative exploration of the parent-child relationship, art and aging.  The IRC production features Kirsten Quinn as Mags Church, the successful artist and daughter of Fanny and Gardner Church, who returns home with a life-changing announcement to the chaos of her parent’s impending move from their lifelong home in Boston’s Beacon Hill.  John Zak plays Gardner Church, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet facing dementia after a lifetime devoted to intellectual and creative pursuits.  Tina Ann Brock plays Fanny Church, Gardner’s wife and Mags’ quirky mother, who has a penchant for ostentatious hats and criticizing her daughter’s choices in life.  The trio explores their changing dynamic relationship over the span of several days.

Tina Howe (1937-2023) was a prolific and influential American playwright. Her most produced plays include Birth and After Birth, Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Approaching Zanzibar and Pride’s Crossing. These and other works premiered at the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Second Stage, The Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Atlantic Theater Company and Primary Stages, as well as being translated and produced abroad.

Among her many awards were an Obie for Distinguished Playwriting, a Tony Award nomination for Best Play, an Outer Circle Critics Award, 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 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, two honorary degrees, 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.

A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Ms. Howe taught at NYU, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA before becoming Visiting Professor at Hunter College in 1990, then going on to launch the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting in 2010 as Playwright-in-Residence.

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, published by Theatre Communications Group. Her other publications include her translations of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson (Grove Press) and Shrinking Violets and Towering Tiger Lilies: Seven Brief Plays about Women in Distress (Samuel French). She is also the subject of Howe in an Hour, edited by Judith Barlow, published by Smith and Kraus. 

The mission of the IRC is to bring the classics of absurdist and absurdist-adjacent theatre to an international audience within the Philadelphia region. We are dedicated to presenting rarely produced, renowned plays that explore and illuminate the human purpose, creating a dialogue with the audience about the relevance and impact of the human condition in our contemporary world.

We are committed to creating theater that is intelligent and thought-provoking. Through performances that are ironic, buoyant, and infectious, the work is designed to displace and transform the audience’s perspective, using language in combination with an entire sensory experience to express ideas that words alone cannot convey. With our dedicated group of artists, we strive to immerse the audience in this process - not just the plot - to ask questions about human existence that resonate and then detonate within each individual.