Baker is unable to make much of the relatively thankless role of uncomprehending youth.) Seldes's choral repetition of the phrase "And so it goes."Īll that said, there is an undeniably affecting emotional core and a shimmeringly black sense of humor, dazzlingly interpreted by the bold, inventive performances of Ms. And one could do without such leaden touches as Ms. Unfortunately, the revelations built around the reasons for A's son's leaving home have less than their intended dramatic impact. There are some eloquently made statements in this act about the vantage points afforded by different ages, particularly on the subject of sexuality. Albee to create a more complete and reflective biography of A, particularly involving her thorny relationship with her son, the symbolic triangle remains much the same, with the youngest woman shouting at the oldest, "I will not become you!" The three actresses return, now as A at different phases in her life. In the second act, a body with an oxygen mask, representing A, is found lying on the bed. Albee, as playwright, not as son.) And throughout all this, A fades between past and present. (In this sense, she is a sort of stand-in for Mr. The caretaker, in turn, is impatient with C's impatience and given to sharp-tongued reminders that A represents C's future. C embodies all the intolerance and the conviction of immortality of youth, and is impatient with the old woman's meanderings. Albee baldly sets these characters up as representatives of three ages of woman.
(There is, very significantly, an additional wordless part, that of the prodigal son, played by Michael Rhodes, who arrives in the second act after his mother has a stroke.) Set in a bedroom (designed by James Noone) whose conventional but lavish appointments bespeak an insulating affluence, the play devotes its first half to dialogue among the aged A B, her 52-year-old acerbic but empathetic caretaker (Marian Seldes), and C (Jordan Baker), a brashly confident 26-year-old from A's lawyer's office who has come to discuss finances. The members of the play's speaking cast are indeed three tall women, whose roles, if not necessarily their functions, change in the play's two acts. Cleanly directed by Lawrence Sacharow, it makes its points so blatantly and repeats them so often that one perversely longs for a bit more of the cryptic obliquity that is Mr. "Three Tall Women," which is basically an anatomy of one life, is by no means an entirely successful play.
As one character states, children should be made "aware they're dying from the moment they're born." Her presence reinforces what has always been implicit in the playwright's works: life must be defined by the inescapable proximity of death. And the way she talks is rooted in the very familiar struggle of the aged with encroaching senility.
Played with virtuosic reversals of mood by the superb Myra Carter, A is a 92-year-old woman (or is it 91, as she insists?) who is on the threshold of death. There is a purely naturalistic reason for her behavior. Albee's enduring obsessions with the elusiveness of personality and its self-deceptions. "I can't remember what I can't remember," she says.īut A is a woman whose speech patterns are not merely stylized representations of Mr. She is given to questing reiteration of certain phrases that take on different shadings in the repetition she shifts disjunctively between arrogant complacency and fearful disorientation and her memory slides and stumbles like a neophyte skater. The woman identified simply as A in Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," the startlingly personal work that is receiving its New York premiere at the Vineyard Theater, shares many of the linguistic and psychological traits common to characters in Mr.