Critical Evaluation
With its unflinching look at mortality and its masterly control of theatricality, Three Tall Women would be a triumph for any playwright. For Edward Albee, the play marked a return to the critical and popular success that had eluded him for fifteen years. Albee established his name as a daring provocateur in 1960 with the New York premiere of The Zoo Story (pr., pb. 1959). He solidified his reputation with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (pr., pb. 1962), winner of the Tony Award, and A Delicate Balance (pr., pb. 1966), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama. With scathing wit and passionate rage, Albee’s early plays decried the emptiness and terror inside the American Dream (he produced and published a play called The American Dream in 1961).
Albee continued to write steadily through the 1970’s and 1980’s, winning a second Pulitzer Prize for Seascape (pr., pb. 1975), but critics and audiences became increasingly indifferent, even hostile, to Albee’s dramaturgy. Three Tall Women premiered in Vienna’s English Theatre in 1991, and few American theaters were interested in producing the play. Lawrence Sacharow directed a successful production at River Arts Repertory in Woodstock, New York, in 1992, but it took over a year to find a New York City venue for the piece. Opening Off-Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 1994, the production transferred to the Promenade Theatre, where it ran for over a year. Three Tall Women won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1994. Albee’s stature in the American theater was reaffirmed with the Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in 1994 and the National Medal of Arts in 1996.
Three Tall Women uses a bifurcated structure to bring its audience to a profound catharsis. Act 1 observes the conventions of realism with its bedroom setting and naturalistic dialogue. The first act allows the audience to judge A, the old lady, externally, much as C gets to know her elderly client. A is strong-willed, arrogant, and volatile; her vanity and selfishness are inextricably tied to her independence and dignity, yet her physical deterioration and frustration are pathetic. While A’s command of her present circumstances seems flimsy, her memories of the past are vivid, and the audience begins to see the pattern of choices and consequences that have made A who she is.
In act 2, Albee radically shifts the theatrical mode. The realist character of a woman embodied by a single actor is fractured into an internal dialogue among A’s three distinct selves, embodied by three actors in a strategy reminiscent of Luigi Pirandello. The audience now listens to A’s interior consciousness, and the character of A becomes fractious and disintegrated as her selves argue with one another about their life, which looks different from each vantage point. A’s young self is horrified by the bitter, compromised woman she will become, while her older selves are cynically amused by her youthful hopes and illusions. Albee’s strategy turns the passive act of remembering into active drama, as the selves accuse and betray one another. Their self-loathing finally gives way to self-acceptance as the three tall women join hands in the final moment of the play.
Albee readily admitted that the main character, A, was based on his own adoptive mother, Frances Cotter Albee, who died in 1989, and many incidents in Three Tall Women recall the family history. The playwright’s relationship with his mother was painful and did involve a twenty-year separation, followed by a chilly reconciliation in later life. The character of the Boy in Three Tall Women is, in a sense, autobiographical, yet that...
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character is notably silent. He does not speak in judgment of his mother, although her disappointment in him is clearly articulated, but he weeps.
An audience need not know the story of Albee’s family to appreciate Three Tall Women. The play looks unflinchingly at aging and dying, the profound mysteries of any human life. Audiences have been deeply moved by the old woman’s acceptance of “coming to the end of it.” In its contemplation of mortality, Three Tall Women recalls Samuel Beckett, one of Albee’s great influences, yet Albee’s voice is distinctly his own, with a venomous wit and an intense, unforgiving eye. Three Tall Women marks the return to power of a masterful American dramatist.