‘THREE TALL WOMEN’ - GLENDA JACKSON AS EDWARD ALBEE’S MOTHER

Glorious Glenda Jackson

HENRY EDWARDS - New York - April 3, 2018

The Broadway production of Edward Albee’s 1991 autobiographical drama, “Three Tall Women,” is the most compelling event of the current theatre season.

What makes the experience even headier is the presence of Glenda Jackson as one of the three title characters. Costars Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill portray the other tall women, and they, too, superb.

It’s been 30 years since two-time Oscar winner Jackson appeared on Broadway, 26 years since she retired from acting to spend 19 years serving in Parliament, and two years since the actress returned to the stage and stood London on its bespoke ear as Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”

Albee freely admitted that “Three Tall Women” brings to life his narcissistic and domineering adoptive mother, Frances Cotter Albee.

The playwright was born in Virginia in 1928 and adopted three weeks later by Reed Albee, an heir to the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters, and wife, Frances. 

Patrician and distant, the couple was unsuited to dealing with an artistically inclined child.

Albee, who grew up feeling like an interloper in their home, subsequently characterized his foster parents as a “white, upper-middle-class, rich, deeply fascistically Republican family.”

Things reached the boiling point and between Albee and his adoptive mother when his politics grew more liberal and he became more open about his homosexuality which Frances despised. 

At the age of 18, he left home and did not see the aggressively unpleasant and judgmental socialite for 20 years.

“It is true I did not like her much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self,” the writer wrote in the introduction to the published edition of his play.

Frances Albee died in 1989 at the age of 91, and it was not until after her death that her son thought the time had arrived to transform his recollections into a play.

His strikingly personal effort scrutinizes, in its various stages, the life of the dying woman.

Albee ranks as the foremost playwright of his generation. Yet in the 1980s, after a debilitating battle with alcoholism and three commercial and critical Broadway failures in a row, he was banished from the New York theatre scene.

After every producer turned down “Three Tall Women,” Albee staged its world premiere at Vienna's English Theatre in 1991.

Three years later, in 1994, in one of the great turnarounds in the history of American drama, an Off Broadway production caused a sensation, and the 26th of Albee’s 35 plays became the only one ever to receive unanimous praise.

Albee had twice earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (for “A Delicate Balance” and “Seascape”) and “Three Tall Women” gave him his third win.

The Off Broadway production of the playwright’s first play, “The Zoo Story,” proved to be brilliant launching pad for his career, and Off Broadway restored him to glory.

“Three Tall Women” is a two-act play with no intermission between the acts and absolutely no story to tell.  It’s all talk, and there’s plenty if it, two hours’ worth to be precise.

Thanks to the pitch perfect direction of Joe Mantello and the stunning delivered by three splendid actresses, you will listen spellbound.

Choosing not to give his characters fictional names, the playwright identifies each alphabetically.

Jackson portrays demanding and imperious 92-year-old “A” (who insists she’s 91).

Wearing a dressing gown, her broken arm in a sling and held together by pins, the ferocious crone rules over her opulent bedroom, beautifully designed by Miriam Buether.

The actress, who seems capable of speaking for ten minutes without stopping to take a breath, drenches the stage with a feverish cascade of alternately funny and appalling memories and remarks.

Two minions attend the cantankerous matriarch, humoring her and rolling their eyes in disbelief.

“B” (Metcalf) is the old woman’s fifty-two-year-old secretary and caretaker. Compassionate, clear-eyed and wryly cynical, she does her level best to manage and negotiate A’s incomprehensible mood swings, inconsistencies and nastiness.

“C” (Pill) is the 26-year-old representative of A’s attorney and she’s there to tidy up some of the old woman’s financial affairs before it’s too late. Impatient and increasingly frustrated by A’s contrariness, C proves unwilling to “be nice.”

It’s obvious both women are dismayed by their client, and it’s hard to blame them.

A is forgetful, self-contradictory, incontinent, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and at times hostile, shouting sudden, vile insults aimed at the living and the dead.

Even though she appears to be suffering from dementia, she suddenly remembers her life experiences in great detail, and that includes a hilariously risqué Albee monologue about her husband’s “pee-pee.”

A married for money and became an affluent society wife, but her sister became a drunkard who was later forced to marry.

Despite caring for her drunken sister and ill mother and husband, she takes pride in her perseverance: “I think they all hated me, because I was strong, because I had to be.”

There’s also a son and there’s a decided coolness between him and his mother.

 “Will he come today?  Is today the day he comes?” A wonders out loud. “He never comes to see me, and when he does he never stays.”

Overcome by rage, she shouts, “I’ll fix him; I’ll fix all of ‘em.”

The act suddenly comes to an uninspected conclusion when A suffers a massive stroke and becomes unresponsive.

Albee, one of the great innovators of the theater, has experimented with various genres and techniques over the years and “Three Tall Women” is no exception.

 In the first act of the play, he looks at his mother from the outside.  In the second act, in order to explore why she became so bitter and odious, he transforms the three tall women into one woman, his mother’s younger, middle-aged, and older selves.

C now represents A in her 20s, B in her 50s, and A in her energetic 70s.

A is no longer the sometimes irrational, uncomfortable creature that inhabited Act One.

 B has been transformed into an already jaded version of an A whose life has been riddled with conflicts and not turned out the way she expected.

 C is an attractive and resourceful 26-year-old who believes her happiness is in the future.

A life sized doll representing a dying A has been placed in her bed and the rear wall of the bedroom has been mirrored to reflect the audience as its watches itself as it watches Albee’s dissection of how we become what we

While A dominated the first half of the play and C did not have much to do, C, brilliantly portrayed by Alison Pill, commands the second half,  a brutal, but also hilarious, account of a lifetime of fighting, misunderstanding and marital woes.

C, all hope and quivering confidence   (she’s a fabulous fun loving 1920s flapper) is convinced she’ll never become her compromising, angry 52-year- old self or the embittered bed-ridden 92-year-old“thing” that lies in the bed.

Nor can she believe s and drive her only son out of the house
She listens in growing panic and disbelief as her older selves tell of what’s in store for her, marriage to a man she doesn't love followed by his and her infidelity, his eventual death, the tortures of ill health, friends and family who disappoint, and most painful of all, the estrangement of a gay son she doesn’t understand, accept or love and drove from the house.

Just then, a young man (Joseph Medeiros, a lookalike for a young Edward Albee), enters, sits on A’s bed and pays respects to the woman he could neither forgive nor forget, touching her hand, giving her a peck on the cheek, but saying not a word.

At the sight of him B explodes: “He left! He packed up his attitudes and he left! And I never want to see him again.  Go away!”

That prompts a discussion of how each version of A, in turn, changed over the years into a vicious old harridan.

At the play draws to a conclusion, the three selves what the happiest moment in life is and Albee provides each with a stirring monologue.

C optimistically believes all of her happiest times haven't happened yet and are yet to come; B thinks that it is the middle of life, during which one can look both back and forward all at once; for A, the happiest moment is yet to come, for in that moment no one will expect her to continue being brave and soldiering on through adversity. 

Her final conclusion: “That’s the happiest moment.  When it’s all done.  When we stop.  When we can stop.”

The fading stage lights signify the end not only to the play but also to the old woman’s life.

Even though “Three Tall Women” concentrates on death and dying, it more profoundly deals with the shape of a human life, the inevitable changes that take place as we age and how we subjectively process those changes at each stage of our lives.  It seems as if no one is really prepared for the changes that are bound to come.

“Three Tall Women” is thrilling, and believe you me, it leaves you with plenty to think about.

Tickets and more information: THREE TALL WOMEN BROADWAY.

Three tall women Laurie Metcalf, Glenda Jackson and Alison Pill on not the easiest of days