Tina Howe parents: Meet Quincy Howe & Mary Post Howe

To express her self-described “obsession” with art and to stretch dramatic forms, Tina Howe, who was born in New York City to a family of writers, writes plays. Although characters in her plays are frequently artists, her themes—renewal and regeneration offered only by children and art—are concerned with the integration of art and daily life.

Howe spent a year in Paris following her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A. 1959), when she also created her first play. While there, she “wrote around the clock…and the infatuation began.” Following her return, she attended Columbia Teachers College and Chicago Teachers College to obtain her teaching certification. She then started working as a high school teacher in Monona Grove, Wisconsin, and Bath, Maine.

Tina Howe parents: Meet Quincy Howe & Mary Post Howe

Tina Howe, a playwright, is the child of Quincy and Mary Post Howe. Howe has consistently asserted a connection to absurdists. Her work, however, more closely recalls the early absurdists, Pirandello and especially Giraudoux, than it does the later, more minimalist absurdists, such as Beckett and Genet, in its humorous exploration of the absurd in a realistic environment.