Existential dread comes very well-upholstered in the Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s dismaying and luxurious Three Tall Women. This is probably Albee’s most personal play, a barbed-wire wreath laid at the grave of his adoptive mother, but he has filtered his experience through an absurdist lens. The play’s vision of life aligns with Beckett’s: darkness on one side, darkness on the other, some pain and disappointment in the middle. “That’s it,” one character says. “You start and then you stop. Don’t be so soft.”
No one has ever accused Albee of being soft, but in director Joe Mantello’s revival, starring Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill, there is a grudging sympathy underlying the spite.
The women are identified as A, B and C. In the first act, Jackson plays A, an imperious woman who may not understand that all those pillows and coverlets – a symphony of cream with jade and citron accents, designed by Miriam Buether – are adornments on her deathbed. Metcalf is B, her caregiver, and Pill is C, a young lawyer assigned to tidy her legal and financial messes while B deals with the physical ones.
There are cool pleasures in the first act, with its disquiet, its comic stings, its insistence on withholding comfort. When A starts to weep, B attempts a truism. “A good cry lets it all out,” she says. “What’s a bad one do?” is A’s acid response.
Jackson’s A is nicely appareled in her satin bedrobe, but Albee is offering an unusually naked portrait of old age. The house lights stay up a long time, as if to remind the audience of their own mortality. He shows us A’s physical indignities and her mental wanderings, though she isn’t so weak that she doesn’t enjoy her power and her spite.
The meanness of life – its cruelty and insufficiency – is often Albee’s business and this first act is business as usual. The second is the more extraordinary, a psychodrama that reveals A, B and C as the same woman in different stages of life – with C still hopeful, B resigned and A beyond either. This act is a beautiful and terrifying portrait of the ways in which life’s open-ended beginnings gradually close in, how we live when we know that fewer and fewer choices remain.
It’s the stronger part of the script, but also perhaps the weaker part of Mantello’s production, because it’s just about impossible to believe that these women are so intimately related. They don’t look alike and they don’t sound alike. That matters less than a refusal to seem or act alike. Jackson – back on Broadway after a break of three decades – is queenly and forbidding, really just extraordinary. Metcalf is comic and forbearing, a variation on her typical antic underdog. Pill is pert and flirtatious, in a performance that’s skilful, but narrower than what her co-stars offer. At the press performance the actors veered off script a couple of times, though they were able to guide each other back.
Twenty-six years separate C and B. A few decades more divide B and A. But there ought to be more continuity between the women, some through-line of attack and style. Of course C doesn’t want to age into B, B doesn’t want to decline into A. “I will not become … that!” C says with anger and horror. “Oh, really?” says A. If only we could still see some faint reflection of C within A, some prefiguring of A within C, that would be the twist in Albee’s honed, pearl-handled dagger of a play.
