There are glimpses of what Chamberlayne Actors Theatre’s production of “Painting Churches” might have been.
The show is the initial offering from the theater company since starting its residency at Hanover Tavern. It features an elderly couple, Fanny and Gardner Church (Jacqueline Jones and Daniel Moore), packing up their upscale Boston home, preparing to move to their Cape Cod cottage.
They are visited by their daughter Mags (Constance Moreau), an accomplished New York artist, who has decided that this transition period will be a perfect opportunity for her to paint a portrait of her mother and father.
When Mags tries to get Fanny and Gardner to sit still for the portrait, the parents turn juvenile, pulling faces and cracking each other up by lampooning other famous poses like “American Gothic.”
The moment effectively conveys one of the key themes in Tina Howe’s 1983 script, demonstrating how these erudite but self-centered parents have consistently undermined their daughter. In this scene, the character interactions are both endearing and heart-breaking. In the rest of the play, they are more likely to be chaotic or unfocused.
Certainly, some level of chaos is predetermined by the script. In the play, Gardner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet suffering from some form of mental decline; he wanders the house randomly dropping pages of a manuscript he will never finish writing. Fanny seems to have been eccentric her entire life, partial to wearing flamboyant hats and prone to abrupt mood changes.
As directed by Kerrigan Sullivan, the bonds between the members of this small family are so tenuous as to be nonexistent with the actors talking past each other more often than to each other. While the frayed nature of their relationships may be the point, it’s hard to care too much about where something’s going with so little understanding of where they’ve been.
Howe’s play has often been called “impressionistic,” like a poem or a Renoir painting. But just as every word must be carefully chosen in an effective poem, every scene must be expertly choreographed to make an impressionistic work like this one cohere. Suffering from too many clumsy moments, this production’s rhythms never coalesce.
The clarity of the action is further hampered by incongruities in the staging. Gardner exclaims in pain after bumping his shin on an ottoman that is clearly padded. Fanny describes a beautiful lampshade she’s created but the one on stage doesn’t match her description. Mags celebrates finding the perfect cloth to act as a backdrop for the portrait then places it out of her siteline while painting.
While each is a minor miscue, they have a deleterious cumulative effect as they continue throughout the play.
The set designed by Hailey Bean is perfectly utilitarian, dominated by a large picture window at the rear of the stage, but gives few clues to the Church’s lifestyle. The script hints at them being Boston brahmins who’ve fallen on hard times but facsimiles of paintings like Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” suggest they might always have been a bit kitschy.
Each actor occasionally finds a way to make an impact. Jones is saddled with the least likable character but finds flashes of playful mischief in Fanny’s eccentricities. Moore is at his best when Gardner recites classic poems by Yeats and Frost with reverence, and Moreau tells a riveting and revealing extended story near the play’s end.
Tellingly, each of these are moments of monologue. When acting in relation to each other, the characters might as well be in separate plays. While some smatterings of comedy and pathos emerge, the overall effect is too blurry to make much impression at all.
“Painting Churches” is playing at Hanover Tavern, 13181 Hanover Courthouse Road in Hanover, through Oct. 19. Tickets and information are available at https://onthestage.tickets/chamberlayne-actors-theatre.