Tony Award Nominee and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Playwright Tina Howe Has Passed Away at 85

Playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Tina Howe died on Monday, August 28th, 2023 at the age of 85. She died of natural causes after a short illness due to complications from a hip fracture sustained in a recent fall. Her longtime agent, Patrick Herold, confirmed.

Ms. Howe (born November 21, 1937) is an American playwright with a career that spans more than four decades. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and studied philosophy at Sorbonne University (Paris), attended Teacher's College at Columbia University and Chicago Teachers College. 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, Lincoln Center Theater, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Atlantic Theater Company, and Primary Stages, as well as being translated and produced abroad. Ms. Howe’s first full-length play to receive a professional production was The Nest, which premiered Off-Broadway at New York's Mercury Theater, opening on April 9, 1970.

Her New York breakthrough came in 1981 with the production of Painting Churches at Second Stage. The play was a massive success and earned Ms. Howe an Obie Award for Best New American Play. Painting Churches moved to Broadway in 1983 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Ms. Howe reunited with Second Stage in 1986 for a production of her play Coastal Disturbances. The play moved to Broadway in 1987, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play and earning Ms. Howe a Tony Award nomination. In 1997, Lincoln Center Theater produced the New York premiere of Ms. Howe’s play Pride’s Crossing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, following the play's original run at The Old Globe. The play was a 1998 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it went on to win the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award for Best Play that season. Her many other awards and accolades include 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, 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.

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 other publications include her translations of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and The Lesson; as well as 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 in 2023. She is also the subject of the book Howe in an Hour edited by Judith Barlow.

Ms. Howe is proud to have served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990. Additionally, 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.

Ms. Howe was married to her husband Norman Levy for 61 years and is survived by her children Eben Levy and wife Cate Latting; Dara Rebell and husband Joshua Rebell; and her 3 grandchildren.