Tina Howe: Ah, Womanhood!

About the author:
Although playwright Tina Howe is best known for what she calls "white glove" plays about upper-crust family life Painting Churches, Pride's Crossing, Coastal Disturbances, she has always had a naughty streak. She satirized the world of contemporary art in Museum, set up a working restaurant onstage in The Art of Dining and produced sparkling translations of two of her favorite absurdist works, Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. And then there's Birth and After Birth, one of the most famous plays that almost nobody has seen. Written by Howe in 1972, Birth and After Birth became notorious for its depiction of a confrontation between the parents of a four-year-old and a pair of childless anthropologists—and that's about all we know of the plot except that Howe once told an interviewer her agent dropped her after reading it. Luckily for adventurous theatergoers, Howe has entrusted this early work to the Atlantic Theater Company, which produced her Ionesco translations two seasons ago. She shared the origins of Birth and After Birth with Broadway.com.

When my brother's German wife shook her finger at me back in the '60s and said, "You're not a woman until you have children," I was speechless! Not a woman? What about my idol, Virginia Woolf? Or the countless other childless women who have excelled in art, science, politics and the boudoir? I was too stunned and insulted to reply, but having been married and childless for five years, part of me naturally wondered if she might be right.

Did working to put my husband through college and graduate school with dreams of writing for the theater make me less of a woman? Was I just some neuter doormat incapable of bringing a child into the world? She'd touched a very tender nerve. Having been raised in an exceedingly literary family of poets, novelists and historians, all I dreamed of was joining their shining ranks. It never occurred to me that I was even capable of having children. When my husband-to-be momentarily lost his senses on our second date and announced, "You know, we could have beautiful children," I ran to Paris as fast as my legs would carry me to write the Great American Play. When I was dragged back home eight months later with a galloping case of hepatitis, what did my darling father read to me on his lunch hour during my three-week hospital stay? James Joyce's Ulysses!

When I finally did have children, I knew exactly what my brother's German wife was talking about, but did that give her the right to say I wasn't a woman until I had them? What about that wild and wonderful year in Paris when I saw Ionesco's plays for the first time and nearly died of joy? And what about my excitement writing the Great American Embarrassment? Had I been a man the entire time?

Having been profoundly moved by Ionesco's artistry celebrating the hollowness of social and political ritual, it occurred to me that very few dramatists had trained a similar lens on female behavior. What if I were to take on the mystery of women's rituals? Courtship, motherhood and aging? What if I could find a way to dramatize my sister-in-law's accusation that a woman isn't a woman until she has children?

And so Birth and After Birth was born. But because producers had never seen anything like it, they ran screaming for the door. So I turned to writing my "white glove" plays about aesthetics or eccentric Boston Brahmins wandering up and down New England beaches. But every so often, I'd dive back into a "bare hands" play about female ritual in an effort to figure out what makes me a woman? Having children? Writing elegiac plays? Primal plays? Hells-a-popping comedies? All of the above? Or none of the above.

I wrote Birth and After Birth in the early '70s when the divide between the women who stayed home to have babies and those who left home in favor of having careers was intense. Mercifully, times have changed, and women have come to expect that they can have it all. But can they? I'm not convinced, and apparently neither are they. It's a very tricky juggling act. Hence its timeliness.

The play enjoyed two productions in the mid '90s—one at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and one at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D.C. Then, as now, I've done considerable work taking responsibility for the mayhem that erupts. Hardly a word has been cut from the original as it was published in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, back in 1977. But the days of Theater of the Absurd are over. Now we're faced with the challenge of writing realistic plays to reflect these absurd times!

What excites me the most about this New York premiere is that it's happening at the Atlantic Theater Company, founded by David Mamet and Bill Macy and now celebrating its 20th anniversary under the inspired leadership of Neil Pepe. So, who's stepping up to the plate to produce a play about women competing over their fertility?

The fellas!

But oh, what classy and sensitive fellas they are!