Edward Albee may be the most puzzling playwright in the English language. His flaws are gargantuan; his gifts are even gargantuaner. The author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, Three Tall Women, and dozens of other plays is a selfish genius who scours his own life (especially his wounded childhood) with the intellectual sandblaster that Beckett turned on existence itself. Albee is, in a way, his own Beckett—he devotes his intimidating intelligence not to the human condition but to the Albee condition.
This combination of great talent and ingrown interests has delivered him a handful of awards (Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes) but a mixed career. You can sense this tension in John Lahr’s review of Albee’s most recent play—Me, Myself and I, which should be the title of his collected works—in the New Yorker. Lahr describes the play in detail but (uncharacteristically) fails to interrogate it, violating the critic’s fundamental mission: to state what a work is trying to do, whether it does it, and whether it was worth doing. You get the sense that Lahr didn’t think much of the play but couldn’t bring himself to say so. At 82 years old, Albee has cowed the critics. Which must be satisfying in its way.
Albee’s true masterpieces excoriate people beyond his narrow family romance. Virginia Woolf and The Goat are examples of quality, outward-directed Albee, The American Dream and The Man Who Had Three Arms of goofy, inward-directed Albee. (Just to confuse matters, I’ll add the 1966 musical adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a famous Broadway flop, as an example of Albee doing a poor job of writing about people besides himself.)
Which brings us to Three Tall Women, a play in two very different acts, in which Albee attempts to square a sense of filial piety with his native dislike for his adopted mother—and succeeds.
In the first act, a wealthy, ancient, and cranky woman named A holds forth to a captive audience of B (her middle-aged caretaker) and C (a young emissary from her lawyers). The effect of act one is more anthropological than artistic, a picture of a certain kind of woman at a certain kind of age: A (the wispy-haired, crankily majestic Megan Cole) talks about “niggers,” “wops,” hard times, and her inability to give her husband a blowjob. B (Suzanne Bouchard with her always classy bearing) humors the old lady. And C (a crisp and precise performance by Alexandra Tavares, whose face can flick between three distinct emotions in three seconds) refuses to humor her, with the callow exasperation of youth.
Old lady A spends act one delivering long monologues about memories broken by her own dementia and Albee’s unceasing fondness for little word games. For example:
C. (To A.) What day do you think it is?
A. (Confusion.) What day is it? What day do I… ? (Eyes narrowing.) Why, it’s today, of course. What day do you think it is!? (Turns to B; cackles.)
B. Right on, girl!
C. (Scoffs.) What an answer! What a dumb…
A. Don’t you talk to me that way!
C. (Offended.) Well! I’m sorry!
A. I pay you, don’t I? You can’t talk to me that way.
C. In a way.
A. (A daring tone.) What?
C. Indirectly. You pay someone who pays me, someone who…
A. Well; there; you see? You can’t talk to me that way.
B. She isn’t talking to you that way.
C. What?
B. She isn’t talking to you that way.
A. (Dismissive laugh.) I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Despite the tight performances, drawn out by director Allison Narver, act one lurches between the tedium of A’s fractured memory—and occasional moments of confused panic—and Albee’s mildly amusing wordplay, which ascends to no greater purpose than cleverness-as-its-own-reward.
But act two is something altogether different, digging beneath the realist portrayal of a feeble old woman and into her psychic core.
When the curtain pulls back on act two, the old lady is lying in her bed, unconscious after a stroke. The same three actors, playing her at different moments in her life (twentysomething C, fiftysomething B, and ninetysomething A), circle the room and get acquainted. C brims over with the dewy-eyed hope of youth, looking forward to a happy future and a happy family. She isn’t a virgin but insists that she’s “a good girl,” while the older versions of her cackle. B is violently bitter about her dysfunctional marriage (to a man she calls “the penguin”) and her gay son. (Nick Garrison plays “Boy,” a mute stand-in for young Albee, who stares balefully at his stroked-out mother while A, B, and C talk around him unseen, like ghosts.) And A, with a full head of white hair and a nice pearl necklace, has come to an end-of-life peace with the dashed hopes of her youth—and a few fulfilled hopes she never knew she had. A has not lost B’s middle-
aged bitterness but merely digested it, metabolized it into something softer and calmer.
The ladder from C to B to A reads like William Blake’s cosmological progress of the soul from innocence to experience to higher innocence—one must pass through the crucible of experience (sin and its resultant suffering) to get to the higher innocence. That is the punishment, and the eventual reward, for growing up. Blessed are those who die young and those who die old, Albee seems to be saying. And pity the ones who die in middle age.
By the play’s final lines, when C and B and A—who spend much of act two recriminating and denouncing each other—have finally united in a moment of death, Albee’s script transcends itself into something beautiful: the grandeur and futility of human life summed up in the moment of death, when a life stops rewriting itself (editing and arguing with itself) and goes off to the press, a finished volume.
It takes the play two hours, two sometimes-tedious hours, to get where it’s going. But it gets there. Three Tall Women lurks beneath all the failed plays Albee has written about himself and his parents, and probably the ones he has yet to write. Albee described the play to the Economist as “a kind of exorcism” that didn’t work: “I didn’t end up any more fond of the woman after I finished it than when I started it.”
Even if the play didn’t reveal anything to him, it does to us—which is just fine. We go to the theater for our own sakes, not for
Edward Albee’s. 
Excellent review and analysis. Every twenty-six-year-old should go see the Rep’s “Three Tall Women.”
Even though act one’s overt length and lack of development got on my nerves, I’ve got to agree overall with this assessment. Act Two is an excellent abstract look across a woman’s lifetime and in itself makes for an excellent play, but I think act one could have accomplished everything Albee set out to do in as little as a few minutes, even if I felt he waited far too long to establish what the other two women were doing in that room with Megan Cole’s character.
And that was where I think Albee’s Act One really missed the mark. I spent the first 30-45 minutes wondering who exactly the other women were and why they needed to attend to this random dying old woman in a hospice room… was Woman B a nurse or a relative? Was Woman C another relative or a lawyer? If the latter, why did she sit there and listen to this woman? Didn’t she have a serious purpose for being there? Why we’re in the room with Woman A to begin with isn’t too big a deal given she and her impending death are clearly established as the focus of the play.
The performances were brilliant and maximized every ounce of the material. The material was brilliant in parts and needed work in others, but because it’s Edward Albee he gets a critical pass.
Beautiful production. When Albee is on point, he can be devastating. In a good way. The three actresses were fantastic. GO SEE IT.
Loved the set design. Very clever and very effective. The actors were all quite accomplished (I’d watch Bouchard in anything, and Cole was amazing as well. I took awhile to warm up to Tavares, but by the second act, I felt she shone brilliantly, as well) and I do enjoy Albee’s words. Nick Garrison made for some lovely and touching set dressing, too. It is a bit long, but I felt it was a pretty successful production.
A lovely concluding pair of sentences; Art (in whatever form) often reveals more about the viewer than the artist. Mr. Albee’s plays, no exception.
Very nice.
Having spent a lot of time with my 99-year-old grandfather, especially during the last year of his life, I immediately understood and recognized the situation, the relationships, and the generational attitudes portrayed in Act I. B was obviously a non-relative caretaker who could sympathize with and indulge A, without any of the familial resentments. C was too young to understand the losses of mind and body that come with age, but she deferred to B’s authority in allowing A to ramble on about her life, which is all that’s left to do for the very old. I thought Act I was spot on and not too long at all. I felt it was remarkable for Albee to write about this woman he had such tremendous bitterness for in such a compassionate and truthful manner. If it seemed to long to you, maybe you are a person who’d have trouble listening to an old person reminisce; I don’t mind at all.
7. Nice try. The cynic in me sees a subtly written troll, but I’ll humor this at face value.
I’ve watched a couple grandparents slowly die in a bed so yes, I know what this is like. That doesn’t make act one good. Sure, you might relate personally to what you’re watching because it’s a dying old woman and you watched a dying relative ramble in bed before, but there’s still no character establishment or plot in that scene. I might relate to someone crying in a bed over a lost love, but that doesn’t mean one hour of that person crying in bed is good theatre or good writing.
We got the point with act one in the first few minutes. The scene did not need to continue unless a catalyst moment came that changed the moment completely. As it stood, it’s simply a Beckettian exhibition of a snapshot in time, a scene that didn’t need to be any longer than a few minutes stretched opaquely thin over a full hour.