Three plays by women light up the season

Margaret Edson's "Wit," Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" and Tina Howe's "Painting Churches" will all have their first major Manhattan revivals in the next six weeks. It is about time.

I don't know about the rest of you, but the prospect of seeing these three wonderful plays again is almost enough to pull me through the hibernation months of the year.

The anticipation is more than personal nostalgia, or so I'd like to believe, and more than belated gender pride for women playwrights from whom we have not heard nearly enough in, let's see now, decades.

It has suddenly struck me that, in my mind, these three works may well turn out to be modern classics. For those who need external validation, remember that "Wit" earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, "Drive" won in 1998 and "Painting Churches" was a finalist in 1984. (Howe was again a finalist in 1997 for "Pride's Crossing.")

None won the Tony Award because, well, despite the acclaim and lengthy transfers from nonprofits to commercial Off-Broadway theaters, no one believed in them enough to transfer them to Broadway.

For one of them, anyway, this is about to change.

WIT, starring Cynthia Nixon, opening Thursday, Manhattan Theatre Club at the Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St.

This exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute drama introduced us to Edson, an important new theater voice who dared to take us on an undignified yet gloriously human journey through late-stage ovarian cancer. Cynthia Nixon will play Vivian Bearing, the aggressively unsentimental, hyper-intellectual John Donne scholar facing the horrific miracles of life and death for all to see.

It's a role created, indelibly, by Kathleen Chalfant, soon to be seen as the mother in "Painting Churches." She says that, back then, the producer considered "Wit" "too sad, too upsetting for Broadway."

"I don't think it was true then, and it isn't true now," she told me Tuesday before heading into her own rehearsal.

A Hollywood star can't hurt the Broadway chances, of course, though Chalfant is quick to point out that Nixon, "an astonishing actor, grew up" in front of all of us in the theater.

It is Edson who has remained the mystery. After "Wit" opened, we learned that this little-known author had degrees in Renaissance history and English literature and had worked in the cancer unit of a research hospital. What we mostly couldn't believe is that Edson, then 37, was a kindergarten teacher in Atlanta.

We also didn't believe her when she claimed she had no intention of writing another play, that she had something to say in this one and said it. Contacted last week, she confirmed that the play "was the thing in my heart I wanted to say ... I had a set of ideas I wanted to work on, and the lonely work of writing for live theater seemed the most direct way."

Now 50, she is still in Atlanta but teaching sixth-grade social studies. "I have a different set of ideas to work on," she says disarmingly, "The public, improvisatory, aggravating, hilarious work of classroom teaching seems the most direct way." If something strikes her, she might write another play. "But I would have to sit down and shut up, and I am not ready to do that yet."

HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE, opening Feb. 13, Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St.

A compassionate tragedy about incest and pedophilia? Paula Vogel's bold, morally complex and inventive play sounds no less impossible than it seemed when Mary-Louise Parker created the role of Li'l Bit at the Vineyard Theatre, with David Morse as Uncle Peck, the grown-up who wants more than to teach her to drive.

Elizabeth Reaser (Esme in the "Twilight" movies) co-stars now with Norbert Leo Butz, best known for Tony-winning performances in musicals. Carole Rothman, artistic director of Second Stage, told me this week that the complexity of the issues "are struggles still in the news, making the play as relevant today, if not more so, than it was 15 years ago." She agrees this is a modern classic, adding that the "beauty of Paula's play" is "at heart, a surprisingly sympathetic and unexpected look at the personal relationship behind the headlines."

PAINTING CHURCHES, opening March 6, Keen Company at the Clurman Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St.

Churches here are aging parents named Fanny and Gardner Church, not houses of worship, in Howe's serious comedy about an artist-daughter who comes from New York to help them pack up their Beacon Hill home. Margaret, called Mags, wants to paint their portrait but, naturally, finds more vast human canvases to explore.

Elizabeth McGovern was the original Mags, with Marion Seldes as the not-so-dotty wife of a rapidly deteriorating and domineering poet-husband. Kate Turnbull is the new Mags. That WASP specialist John Cunningham (replacing Richard Easton, who had a scheduling conflict) plays Gardner, with Chalfant as Fanny.

When she was younger, Chalfant believed Howe's autobiographical play was about the daughter. Now, she's convinced it is a "complicated love story between Fanny and Gardner." Similarly, the actress believes "Wit" is, ultimately, not a play about death but about love. Like "Wit" and "How I Learned to Drive," she says, "Painting Churches" ends in a "complicated way. It says, 'Things are not all good, but they're OK ... OK for right now.'"

And, right now, it's very good that they're back.