[Feingold is an American critic and translator. In the following excerpt, he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Three Tall Women.]

Every writer knows that the hardest task in writing is to find your center. Once you're there, words, thoughts, events, characters, ideas, whatever, will flow freely. And the results, after some contemplation, will be far easier to shape and polish than if you had forced them. The hard part is getting to that sacred place at the core of your being from which all literary blessings flow.

On this count, the renaissance of Edward Albee is one of the happiest events in the history of American playwriting. After the era of forced writing that brought us treats like Counting the Ways and The Man Who Had Three Arms, and the era of self-imposed exile when he no longer cared to face the critical attacks such plays provoked, we have two newish Albee plays [being produced this season], one 11 years old (Finding the Sun) and one written within the last four (Three Tall Women). Both are alive, peopled, fresh, funny, a little harrowing, and tangibly authentic—the good qualities of Albee's exciting early plays. They come from the center; far from offering critical analysis or captious reservations, the press should probably sponsor parades….

[Perfect] in its fairness is the full-length Three Tall Women, clearly Albee's all-out attempt to do justice to Mommy. [Like his 1960 work, The Sandbox, this too] is a death scene: The ailing, cantankerous heroine is flanked by her weary, stooped, middle-aged companion and a blankly helpless young newcomer from her lawyer's office. Power games, medical details, and recriminations ensue, leading to an apparent stroke. In Act II, the women appear as three aspects of the stroke victim, now helpless under an oxygen mask: her young, middle-aged, and old selves. The handsome Young Man, suffering mutely at her bedside, is no cartooned Angel of Death, but her son as he looked the day he left the house for good.

In this act, the middle-aged self dominates: Marian Seldes, who's had self-effacing, galumphing fun as the first act's humble companion, comes into her own, commanding the stage, head high, with fierce, grand-manner gestures, flanked—and sometimes outflanked—by Myra Carter's slyly stagy, astringent undercutting as the old woman. The staginess is in the character; you see how Albee might have gotten his theatrical instinct from this woman, with her calculated tantrums and high-handed tyrannizing.

The mother's story, as the three women relay it to each other, not without dispute, is the story of a tall beauty brought low—by her need to succeed in a society where women are ancillary, by the contrast between her modest upbringing and her married wealth, by rivalry with her prettier but less stable sister, by increasing frustration with husband and family, by failure to overcome inhibitions taught in an earlier age, finally by old age and illness. The author's love and hate, denial and acceptance, of this complex woman whirl around the room, almost visibly, while his mute spokesman onstage sits motionless, holding the hand of her almost-corpse.

Three Tall Women's fullness as writing makes it a big achievement, with only one minor flaw: The first act, which is really a prologue to the substantive second, goes on slightly too long, and should probably lose some of its repetitions.