THREE TALL WOMEN: Glenda Jackson Hits One Out of the Ballpark in Revival of Edward Albee's Funny-Vicious Play

Even if the only Edward Albee work you are familiar with is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you will have a pretty good idea that the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has a way with funny-vicious dialog that comes as close to drawing blood as you can with words alone.  

But if you think George and Martha are a nasty pair, wait until you spend 100 minutes or so in the company of the noxious old lady (apparently a stand-in for Albee's own adoptive mother) at the center of Three Tall Women, which is being given a stunning revival at Broadway's John Golden Theater.  

The play, written in two acts but performed here with only a brief pause between Act I and Act II, is a reflection (or perhaps a justification) of why Albee left home at the age of 17 with barely a backward glance for two decades. 

Of course, it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt since we only get Albee's version of things, but if the character referred to as "A" in Three Tall Women is even remotely similar to the real Frances Albee, she must have been a barrel of laughs to live with, only marginally better than, say, a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

This production stars Glenda Jackson as "A." And if she doesn't walk off with a Best Actress Tony Award for this, I'll eat – well, not my hat, but maybe a piece of cake because no one can predict these things with absolute certainty. 

But Tony or not, Jackson is brilliantly odious playing a wealthy nonagenarian women whose greatest pleasures consist of (a) being the center of attention at all times and (b) spewing venom about everyone and everything in her life. 

This is more than just the misery of old age, for which she is quite possibly justified, as evidenced by a loss of mental clarity and bodily function, not to mention a broken arm that can never heal.  When poet Dylan Thomas wrote that those nearing the end of their lives should "rage, rage against the dying of the light," he could have been advising Jackson's character. 

Few could rage nearly as well as she spews out a litany of her many grudges and complaints. She is the King Lear of old ladies. (Interestingly enough, King Lear was the very role Jackson took on at London's Old Vic in 2016 when she returned to acting after serving two decades as a Member of Parliament; I'd bet a good couple of bucks that we'll see her in that role on Broadway not long after Three Tall Women ends its run, especially if she wins the Tony.) 

You might be able to guess from the title, that Ms. Jackson is not alone on the stage.  She is joined by two other women. Alison Pill plays "C" and Laurie Metcalf plays "B." 

In Act I, these are three distinct women. Ms. Pill's character   works for Ms. Jackson's law firm and has come to straighten out some unpaid bills and other paperwork the older woman has neglected out of spite, through forgetfulness, or a combination of both. Ms. Metcalf's role is that of a paid caregiver, a part the highly skilled actress takes on with careful attention to facial expression, shrugs, and other physical manifestations of her generally cheery helpfulness in the wake of the many challenges her job brings.   

Alison Pill, Glenda Jackson, and Laurie Metcalf
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Unexpectedly, but welcomely, there are also lots of dark, comically absurd lines in Act I that will leave you laughing, even as you sense the gathering storm that unleashes its full fury in Act II.  





At the end of Act I, Ms. Jackson has lain down on the bed that dominates the set - an upscale bedroom designed by Miriam Buether. And just before the break, she falls silent, the victim of a stroke.

After a brief pause, we move into Act II and the old woman's final journey into night.  The set has been rearranged, with a large mirror dominating the back wall. It is undoubtedly symbolic of "reflection," since that's what happens for the rest of the play. Ms. Pill, Ms. Metcalf, and Ms. Jackson have been rearranged like the furnishings, so that they are now all aspects of the same person: the three tall women of the title. Here, the old woman is reflecting on her mostly miserable life through the three women. The youngest is 26, the middle one is 52, and the oldest is Ms. Jackson at somewhere in her 70s (for one thing, the sling she wore in Act I is gone, and she actually does look younger). 

The "Three Tall Women"
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Ms. Pill's character is there mostly to listen to what her life will become as she ages. As painted by Ms. Metcalf and Ms. Jackson, it's not a pretty picture. Yet, while it all sounds as gloomy as can be, in the hands of these three splendid actresses, and with Albee's near-perfect writing and fine directing by Joe Mantello, Three Tall Women stands tall in its own right as one of the finest productions of an Albee play to grace the Broadway stage. 

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Scratching My Head

One real advantage of living in New York is that I am able to indulge my affinity for the theater five to ten times a month. But even at that, I have no desire to see everything. I pick and choose shows that I believe I will find compelling and that will allow me to willingly suspend my disbelief for a period of time. With every performance I attend, I go in the hope of being caught up in some combination of the playwright’s way with words, the individual and collective performances of the actors, the vision of the director, the way the set design contributes to the overall production, and, of course, if it’s a musical, the music, lyrics, singing, choreography, and the interplay between the musicians and the singers and dancers.

Rarely does everything fall into place, but I am not a demanding perfectionist as a theatergoer. What I do expect is professionalism from a professional theater company; not to be condescended to as a member of the audience; and not to be treated to smoke and mirrors in lieu of a good script.

Since New Year’s Day is meant for reflection, I have decided to take this opportunity to look back over the first half of the 2010-2011 theater season and the two dozen shows I have seen on and off Broadway. I have to say that more than a few of these have left me scratching my head for one reason or another, so rather than a play-by-play overview, I thought I might share a few of my moments of puzzlement before we plunge into the second half of the season.

Let me start with the one show that left me puzzled not over its conception or execution, but over its failure to connect with a larger audience. That would be John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical, The Scottsboro Boys. I am as confused by the early demise of this Tony-worthy show as I was about last year’s puzzling failure, the excellent revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, attracted no audience whatsoever.

The Scottsboro Boys provided originality, strong performances by a very talented and energetic cast, a top-notch score, and fine directing and choreography by Susan Stroman. The show aroused some controversy because of its use of the minstrel show format to tell the real-life story of a group of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in deeply segregated Alabama in the early 1930s. I can understand the discomfort associated with the nature of the plot device, although anyone seeing the show would, I should hope, recognize its use as a means of satirizing and skewering racism and bigotry.

Previously, The Scottsboro Boys had done well at Off Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and spent additional time polishing itself up in a production at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater before heading uptown, where it landed in fine form—or so I thought when I saw it. And yet it is gone, with just a small possibility of renewal through a drive to bring the show back to Broadway for at least another short run prior to the Tony Awards. For information and to participate in that effort, I direct you to the website http://scottsboromusical.com.

Now, however, let’s turn our attention to some different kinds of head-scratchers I encountered in the last several months. And I promise, not one word about Spider-Man.

A trio of esteemed veteran playwrights with long and successful careers and a not insubstantial pile of awards all came up short with new or newish plays that left me thinking of unhappy metaphors like that of wells running dry. I speak of Edward Albee, John Guare, and Peter Nichols, who gave us, respectively, Me, Myself, & I; A Free Man of Color; and Lingua Franca.

None of these plays was a total failure by any means, but none approached the level of expectations for work from such original and skilled playwrights. The first of these was an absurdist comedy at heart but came off as pretty inane; the second was a confusing mind-trip of a history pageant; the third harked back—perhaps intentionally, but not very interestingly—to the “angry young man” post World War II era of playwriting by the likes of John Osborne. I do have to wonder if any of these plays would have been produced had they not carried the by-lines of their well-respected authors.

Another puzzler was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which, despite some A-List casting and its well-regarded director, never seemed to jell. What Woman on the Verge needed most, in my view, was some serious editing, including the elimination of several roles and recasting of some of the others. The standouts were the set design and projections (by Michael Yeargan and Sven Ortel, respectively), and the ditzy comic performance of Laura Benanti. Therefore, despite the show’s weaknesses, I do expect to see a couple of Tony nominations.

Also on my list is Elling, an adaptation of a quirky movie of the same title and a trilogy of novels by the Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjørnsen. The play, about two unlikely roommates trying to survive in the world upon being released from a mental institution, starred Denis O’Hare and Brandan Fraser, both of whom tried their utmost to create real characters out of these two oddball personalities. But Elling was a head-scratcher from the outset, and other than a couple of bright moments by the leads and a few seconds of inspired wackiness by a game Jennifer Coolidge, I can’t begin to guess why anyone thought this might work on Broadway.

There are other shows I could talk about, including the clunky and amateurish production of Dracula, now in previews at the Little Shubert Theatre, but I wanted to focus here on major Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, where the effort was made to present something original and different, and that represented work by well-established theater professionals. While I have found the shows I have discussed to be puzzling, none was a total artistic failure, and one, The Scottsboro Boys, met pretty much all of my criteria for a top-notch show.

It just goes to show, theater is like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get!

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Edward Albee's latest: Both ABSURD and absurd

There are two good reasons to see Edward Albee’s latest play, Me, Myself And I, making its New York debut after its original run as a commissioned play for Princeton University’s McCarter Theater in 2008.

The first reason is the obvious one: to see what the octogenarian Mr. Albee, one of the great American playwrights of the second half of the 20th Century, is up to these days.

The other reason is to catch the wonderfully wacked out performance of Elizabeth Ashley in the lead role of Mother.

Picture Albee’s crazed and sharp-tongued Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? Now take that image and turn it inside-out into a demented comic figure with the same larger-than-life personality, and you’ve got an idea of the gloriously crazy (in a good way) portrayal that Ms. Ashley gives us. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she is onstage; she is a wonder to behold.

As for the play itself, let’s just say that Me, Myself And I teeters between Absurd (as in “theater of the…”) and absurd (as in ludicrous). Albee has fun toying around with metaphysical ideas such as existence and identity, and borrows shamelessly from a variety of theatrical devices, including the dissolution of the “fourth wall” that is said to exist between actors and audience, and even a wild and crazy twist on the ancient deus ex machina. There is much to enjoy in the performances of both Ms. Ashley and her partner, Dr.--played by Brian Murray with his always delightful flair and comic timing--including one priceless scene with Mother and Dr. picnicking in a large empty space. The dialog in this scene recalls nothing less than a conversation between Didi and Gogo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The plot, such as it is, spins on a crisis involving Mother’s identical twin sons, “OTTO” (Zachary Booth) and “otto” (Preston Sadleir), whom Mother has never been able to tell apart beyond believing that one loves her and the other does not.

Given the twins’ names, you would be right to guess that Albee enjoys playing with words; there’s even the suggestion of a “third twin” named Otto (or OTTO or otto), “in italics,” as OTTO explains. It is OTTO who gets everyone riled up when he announces that he intends to “become Chinese” and, also, by the way, that otto no longer exists. OTTO’s declaration about his brother triggers a series of events in which, among other things, otto becomes increasingly frantic to prove that he does, indeed, exist.

Be warned that all is not played for laughs, and there is an element of crudeness that occasionally creeps in that I found off-putting. And given that Albee has previously dealt with the existence and non-existence of children (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?) and the idea of twin boys who may or may not have been separated at a young age (The American Dream), it will be interesting to see how Me, Myself & I will be parsed and analyzed down the road.

But speaking as a member of the audience, I’ve got to say this is pretty lightweight fare, a joujou to enjoy for its craziness, and, especially, for Elizabeth Ashley’s wonderfully outlandish performance.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.