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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'Domesticated’: Backstabbing, American Style

Playwright Bruce Norris, who most effectively skewered issues of racial politics in his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play Clybourne Park a couple of years back, has turned his eye toward a new target—that of gender politics—in Domesticated, now on view at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

Domesticated gives us Norris’s take on the war between the sexes in a way that places the play in a most interesting juxtaposition to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, currently in revival on Broadway (link to review here). 

Both deal with infidelity. But whereas Pinter’s approach is to peel back the characteristically British layers of reserve and repression to reveal the pain beneath the surface, Norris opts for the American in-your-face route, where emotions and opinions are out there for everyone to inhale like so much second-hand smoke.   

Mr. Norris has drawn his inspiration from the sexual shenanigans of real-life public figures like Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, and Eliot Spitzer. In doing so, he has run the risk of offering up an evening’s entertainment that could be viewed as little more than an all-too-easy comedy skit. The truth is, there is a good bit of that (how could there not be, given the target?), but Domesticated is also a provocative work about the inability of men and women to ever understand one another.  

As the play opens, we find ourselves listening to a dry presentation by a teenage girl, Cassidy (Misha Seo), who is showing slides of various representations of sexual dimorphism within the animal kingdom.  She will continue to do this at several points during the play, providing more and more unusual examples that serve to make sly reference to her “men are from Mars; women are from Venus” adoptive parents, the clueless and self-justifying Bill (Jeff Goldblum) and the hell-hath-no-fury Judy (Laurie Metcalf). 

The very first scene following the brief slide show is one that will be quite familiar to pretty much anyone who owns a television set.  Bill, a physician-turned-politician, is holding one of those confessional press conferences with his loyal wife at his side.  It seems that a prostitute with whom he was having an assignation lies in a coma brought on by a head injury she sustained while she and Bill were together—and covering it up is not an option.    

Judy’s silent show of support quickly dissipates when the pair are alone and more details of his escapades emerge, including the fact that he has been a long-time customer of the sex-for-hire industry.  Bill, who is inordinately gifted at finding ways to make a bad situation worse, rationalizes that he has lied about everything out of respect for Judy.  Later, when he is forced to step down from office and cannot find work as a physician (he is, ironically, a gynecologist, unlikely to engender much trust from any would-be patients) Judy suggests he can always find work as a pimp—a bitter but very funny line when delivered with Ms. Metcalf’s perfect timing.

Throughout all of these travails, Bill is not only castigated by his wife, but also by the couple’s other daughter, Casey (Emily Meade), an avowed women’s rights advocate with a teenager’s unerring capacity for holding her parents accountable to an unreachable level of perfection.  Between Judy and Casey, Bill does not get to utter another word until the end of the first act, when he declares he is leaving because he is “not happy.”  (Mr. Goldblum does a stellar job of expressing himself through pained facial expressions during the long period of his character’s enforced silence).

If Judy has her say in first half of the play, Act II belongs to Bill, who seems to have taken as his role model the totally clueless idiot played by Larry David in the long-running HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm.  Bill tries to make a life for himself, even managing to talk his way into a low-paying job at a medical clinic.  But he spends much of the time shooting off his mouth, and subsequently shooting himself in the foot as well, as a self-appointed guardian of men in their never-ending battle with “women!” 

This is not a play that ends with any great breakthrough or epiphanies.  In the end, Bill and Judy share a ceasefire, which may as good as it will ever get. 

In the capable hands of Ms. Metcalf and Mr. Goldblum, as well as the rest of the excellent cast and director Anna D. Shapiro, Domesticated is a strong follow-up to Clybourne Park, in which cluelessness, misunderstanding, and miscommunication also served to trip up the best efforts of the characters to get along.  Perhaps this is Mr. Norris’s great strength as a playwright, the ability to help us to see how difficult it is for any of us to empathize with those who are dissimilar—in terms of race, gender, socio-economic status, or any other cultural indicator. 

Wonder what he could do with the red/blue political divide that has ensnared this nation in recent years. 

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