Don’t let the title throw you: This is no epic about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. The subject of Tina Howe’s play “Painting Churches” is an elderly couple named Fanny and Gardner Church. And it’s their daughter, Mags, who’s working on their portrait.
While intimate in scale, the Keen Company’s revival of Howe’s 1984 Pulitzer finalist does have an outsize star in Kathleen Chalfant (“Wit,” “Angels in America”). As Fanny, she is the greatest asset in a show that otherwise never quite finds its pulse.
Perhaps director Carl Forsman was overly reverential toward the well-heeled setting, and lost track of the fact that the playwright behind “Coastal Disturbances” and “Pride’s Crossing” — also set in a privileged, WASP-y milieu — was writing about pent-up anger and deterioration.
The Churches (Chalfant and John Cunningham) are busy packing their Boston townhouse before a move. Fanny may behave eccentrically — she has a taste for hats, even indoors — but she has a mind like a steel trap. She certainly keeps Gardner, a scatterbrained but celebrated poet, on track as he tries to work on a manuscript and sort his books.
An artist in New York, Mags (Kate Turnbull) visits with a goal: to paint her parents for her breakthrough gallery show. But this self-absorbed faux bohemian hasn’t seen her family in a year, and must face some daunting news.
The Churches have fallen on hard times, and are leaving their elegant home for a small beach cottage on Cape Cod.
As for Gardner, he isn’t just a ditzy intellectual: He’s losing his marbles, and Fanny must care for him.
The entire first act spools out slowly, raising some unanswered questions — can’t the family make extra money by selling off some of its precious heirlooms and first editions? When Mags brings up a relatively benign childhood trauma, she comes across as grating rather than touching.
And then comes Act 2, the time of reckoning.
By then, Mags is busy with her painting, and the Churches have packed up more of their house.
But Beowulf Boritt’s set doesn’t change enough to suggest this emptying. It’s an important symbol, though, because the Churches are trying to put up a good front as they’re falling apart.
“What about opening your eyes and really seeing us,” Fanny asks Mags. This is where Chalfant is at her finest, her smoky voice like a melancholy, elegant cello.
If there’s one vivid portrait in “Painting Churches,” it’s the one Chalfant draws of her character.