Painting Churches is a theatrical portrait of the complex relationship between aging parents and their artist daughter. A promising artist comes home to Boston to help her aging parents move from their Beacon Hill home to their Cape Cod cottage. But she is ill-prepared for what she finds. Her gentle father, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, has been inexorably losing his bearings to what looks like Alzheimer's, and her mother, abrasive and narcissistic even under normal circumstances, is half-cracked from caregiver stress. What follows is both gift and expose: an eager-to-please daughter's celebration of her parents, and an artist's ruthless examination of her roots.

Wall Street Journal called Howe, "one of the most incisive and original dramatists."

Time Magazine called the Painting Churches, "radiant, loving, and zestfully humorous."