In 1995, Tina Howe was asked by her publisher to suggest artwork for the cover of her new anthology. Howe thought of Christo, the Bulgarian environmental artist who erected orange gates in Central Park, wrapped the Reichstag in polypropylene and ran a nylon “fence” twenty-five miles across California. Howe has “out-of-control enthusiasm” for Christo’s talent for revealing a thing’s essence by covering it in extravagance. What Christo does on land, Howe does on stage.

Tina Howe was born in 1937 into a “very New England, very WASP, very literary family.” Her aunt was a celebrated performer, her uncle a renowned Harvard law professor and her grandfather a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. Her father was a famous newscaster for CBS; her mother was a “character.” The Howes broke the family’s blueblood mold with their eccentricity: her father read Trotsky to his mother on their honeymoon, and they would just as likely take Tina to see a Marx Brothers film as they would read James Joyce’s Ulysses aloud to her. Growing up, at five-foot-eleven and with no front teeth for several years, Tina was, in her words, “tall, creepy, thin and strange.”

Though Howe had begun writing while attending Sarah Lawrence College, it wasn’t until she’d graduated and lit out for Paris in 1959 that she developed a passion for theatre. During that year abroad, a friend took Howe to see the world premiere of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist drama The Bald Soprano. Howe was in raptures. “What scholars label ‘absurd’ was totally familiar to me! I knew the characters on stage! I’d grown up with them. I spoke their language! I shared their fears. It was the most astonishing flash of déjà vu I’d ever experienced,” Howe said of seeing the play. “I’d already developed my sense of the absurd from my sense of myself as a ludicrous person.”

Critics have called Howe’s plays “manic farces” and “antic elegies” that use “anarchic humor” to locate, Christo-like, the remarkable in the unremarkable. In The Art of Dining (1979), a neurotic writer finds herself covered in the food she can’t eat. In Approaching Zanzibar (1989), an ailing painter stages a game of ‘terrify the relatives’ who have driven cross-country to visit. In One Shoe Off (1993), vegetation overtakes a couple in a barren marriage. In Chasing Manet (2009), two women plot their escape from a nursing home. And in Painting Churches (1983), a woman finds peace with her parents only when she turns them into art. “We all live the same lives,” the playwright said in a 2003 lecture, “what makes us unique are our fantasies.”

Farcical plots, delirious wordplay and insightful investigations of contemporary mores are Howe’s inheritance from Ionesco, of whom she considers herself a “disciple.” Her “hopeless infatuation with extravagance” informs her belief that “theatre is an arena for celebrating excess— outrageous settings, lush language and intense emotions.” If Painting Churches is theatrically Howe’s most conventional play, it is also her most lyrical, signaling her goal to “present a lovely exterior, then seduce the audience into the dark and mysterious places inside.” It’s true that no toddler is portrayed by a large hairy man (like in Birth and After Birth from 1972), and no one licks icing off someone else’s naked body (like in The Nest from 1977). But Gardner and Fanny pose lavishly, waltz about and teach verse to a pet bird when they’re not sipping Dubonnet— and sometimes when they are. It’s easy to say the Churches are eccentric— or, in Gardner’s case, stricken with illness. However, it’s just as easy for us to be entertained by their antics, and in so doing glimpse flashes of truth about their aging marriage, the flashes Mags finally sees in wispy brushstrokes of purple and orange.

Christo granted Howe’s request to put a photo of Running Fence on her book. He was so flattered she’d asked that he sent her several large-scale prints of his work. Howe didn’t know whether to hang them on her wall, or crawl inside the giant mailing tube and live with them. “I’m hopelessly drawn,” the playwright has said, “to digging out the flamboyant in everyday life.”