Three Tall Women

Perhaps I have said this before ... but what a difference a week makes. Seven days ago, I lamented Mamet's misogynistic Boston Marriage. Here's another three-woman play by a modern (male) master, but the results could not be further from that extended strawwoman argument.

Edward Albee's Three Tall Women is a beautiful work, diving deeply into the life of one woman as she nears her end. There's a clever conceit as the individual characters from the first act are transformed into aspects of the woman at different stages of her life in the second ... but gimmickry is not the aim, deep investigation is. In the preface to the Plume edition, he makes it clear the old woman is based on his adoptive mother:

Is the woman I wrote in Three Tall Women more human than its source? Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last twenty years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?

"Fascinating" does not mean "likable", and that's where this play succeeds so well. Though firmly in Albee's constant milieu of East Coast Elite, the old woman is both a a product of her time and also a rough-edged individual that speaks plainly about the scope of her life. I'm almost at a loss to describe why this play is so effective: I expect brain from Albee, but this is pure heart, an outpouring of humanity on par with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. I wasn't expect heart from a play where the three women are named "A", "B" and "C".