Three Tall Women

Three Tall Women is Edward Albee's third play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It may be the best play that Albee has written. It balances his trademark ambiguity (dialogue and scenes that seem almost realistic but veer slightly off kilter, into a reality that has sharp and painful edges) with a heartbreaking poetry composed 99% of the ordinary language we all use every day. Three women sit in a bedsitting room: a well-off elderly woman, 90, 91, or 92 depending on who's counting, drifts in and out of reality, falls back on the past in repetitive coda, is never very nice and is occasionally outright nasty in the way she treats her companions; a fiftyish caregiver, her sympathy for her charge worn down by the old woman's complaints and pettiness; a twentyish lawyer, sent to persuade the old lady to cash her checks and pay her bills, and repulsed by her constant tirades and close-minded bigotry. The old woman dominates their conversation. It falls back again and again into monologue, the old lady reliving her past. Watching her behavior, seeing her drift in and out dementia is a wrenching experience, especially for a viewer like me who's already several steps along life's path. I won't tell you what happens later in the play but the second act completely transforms the revelations made in the first act and brings the play to a sad but richly lyrical close.

It's unusual for a playwright to produce his or her best work in late-career, but that's what Albee has done in *Three Tall Women.* The essence of Albee's genius has long been his ability to get language to do what he wants, rather than being constrained by what language wants to do. But in *Three Tall Women*, unlike in *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf*, there's something urgent and concrete at stake: what, exactly, was the meaning of a dying woman's ninety-two year life? It's this question that fuels the gripping conflict between the play's three characters, "A", "B", and "C", who represent a single woman at ages 26, 52, and 92. There is so much in *Three Tall Woman* for brilliant actresses to exploit that the play seems virtually certain to be a hot ticket for as long as live theater exists. It's the kind of play that, if properly cast, could sell out the National Theater of Mars, or a similarly remote venue.

A very remarkable life experience shared through the self. I love Albee. Such a fluid writer. Willing to expose s--t and anguish and self-loathing and nostaglia and laugh about it. This play is very direct, interesting, full of mortal longing presented though an amazingly simple concept. The three tall women, A, B and C are one woman. But at three different times in their own life. What comes is a moving sweep of life, as thought through in the future by C, the past and future by B and the past by A. What would you ask yourself if you met you twenty-five or sixty years from now? What would you say to yourself knowing what you know now to you thirty years ago? Etc., etc. There is no denying, the concept and idea of such a dialogue is ancient, and here Albee contemparizes it in the bittersweet way that life is. Read this if you love Albee, if your into philosophy, time travel, theoretical physics, feminism....There is no denying.

I have been studying the plays of Edward Albee, for three months. This play and the Zoo Story have me think about life and self, more then anything I have read in years. Albee is able to portray in an unsual way his true feelings about his background as well as his atitude towards the characters that he portrays. I want his plays to go on and on! The characters are very real, and for the most part very sad.Life goes on in the real world even with people that he portrays being a part of it.

This play has imaginatively captured a lifetime of struggles one woman experiences, depicted as three women as the same woman in different ages in her life. Albee uses believable situations that are all easily relatable, emphasizing how we deal with our problems and how we deal with ourselves. I would recommend this play for theatergoers, novel readers and especially students of the theater. "Three Tall Women" should sit on the shelf next to "The Glass Menagerie" and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses". Happy reading!