TINA HOWE

BURIAN LECTURE The Thrill and Danger of Writing for the Theatre February 8, 2000 (Tuesday) 8:00 p.m. Studio Theatre, PAC READING February 9, 2000 (Wednesday) 8:00 p.m. Recital Hall, PAC 4:00 Informal Seminar, Humanities B-39 UAlbany, Uptown Campus

Tina Howe has been writing for the stage for more than thirty years. Her best known works include The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Approaching Zanzibar, One Shoe Off, and her most recent play, Pride's Crossing.

Howe has won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Rockefeller grant, two NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1987 her play Coastal Disturbances received a Tony nomination for Best Play. Pride's Crossing was selected as a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and awarded the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

In Pride's Crossing, Howe has created a remarkable heroine in the character of Mabel Tidings Bigelow, who at the age of 26 set the world record for swimming the English Channel. We meet her at age 90, as she looks back on a life that spans the twentieth century. Structured like memory, the play's scenes criss-cross through time, from her youth through the events that have shaped her life. "Most plays you watch," writes Clive Barnes in the New York Post, "but every so often there comes one you experience. Tina Howe's delightful and moving Pride's Crossing, is definitely one you experience and savor. . .a play I think you will remember forever." Pride's Crossing was recently published (1998) by Theatre Communications Group.

Her other works include The Nest, Birth and After Birth, Museum, and most recently, Women in Flames. Her works premiered at the Los Angeles Actors Theater, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, The Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater and the Second Stage. Tina Howe has been a visiting professor at Hunter College since 1990 and an adjunct professor New York University since 1983. Her works can be read in numerous anthologies as well as in Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe, Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays, and Pride's Crossing published by Theatre Communications Group. She has served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990. Her husband, Norman Levy, taught American History at the University at Albany from 1967-73.

The Burian Lecture is cosponsored with UAlbany's Theatre Department and is funded by a gift from Dr. Jarka Burian and Grayce Susan Burian.

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