‘Three Tall Women’: Thrice the Fun and Agony

Perhaps because of 25 years as a Labour M.P. in British Parliament, delivering gnashing speeches to the honorable members of the Opposition, Glenda Jackson’s incredible voice has not lost any of its muscle.

She is 81 and, having retired from politics in 2015, returned to the London stage in 2016 to play King Lear, the most grueling of Shakespeare’s roles. Now, after a 30-year absence from Broadway, she’s back in Edward Albee’s lacerating drama “Three Tall Women,” expertly revived by Joe Mantello. Remarkably, this is the play’s Broadway premiere, occurring nearly 25 years after its Off Broadway debut, which won the playwright his third Pulitzer.

Much ink has already been spent on Ms. Jackson’s virtuoso performance here in Albee’s most autobiographical work. As the woman identified simply as A, she plays a 92-year-old (91, she insists) dowager — wealthy, imperious, mean as an adder, racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. She’s frail, incontinent, succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and facing death, but still capable of launching insults at her two companions: B, played by the equally gifted Laurie Metcalf, fresh off her screen success in “Lady Bird,” and C, played by Alison Pill, who can hold her own even in such lofty company.

The drama starts off merely as a vignette: the cantankerous A, needy and venomous in her lavish boudoir, bossing around B, her middle-aged caretaker who helps her through the indignities of life, while verbally punching C, the young lawyer sent to put the old battle-ax’s affairs in order. Then, rather artfully — this is a swift hour-and-45-intermission-free production — the triumvirate transforms into the same person, delineated by costumes in varying shades of lilac. 

The change comes with the force of one of A’s insults. Turns out, we are witnessing A’s timeline, the anatomy of her life in three stages: a hopeful 26-year-old refusing to believe such an embittered future; a 52-year-old looking back at her naive version and forward to something horrendous, therefore acknowledging she’s at life’s summit, and the autumnal 92-year-old, staring down senility but with all her marbles, ruminating on a lifetime of reasons that have left her so bilious. 

Albee once said he wrote “Three Tall Women” as a form of “exorcism,” directly inspired by his adoptive mother, to whom all the adjectives attributed to A can be applied. He grew up in a privileged household, but it was a childhood from which he couldn’t wait to escape. His father was cold and unavailable and his mother, full of resentment and vitriol, simply detested him. Although Albee disliked critical analysis of his plays, even he would concede in interviews that the oft-occurring theme of parental failings was largely rooted in his own experiences. When asked how long it had taken him to write “Three Tall Women,” he once replied, “all my life.”

Whether it was indeed his inescapable unhappiness that spurred him to write at least one play a year between 1959 and 2009, one will never know, for the playwright died in 2016 in his home in Montauk, which he bought around 1964, a couple of years after “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway.

In fact, the monetary success of that now-canonized, marital bloodbath drama was so immense it enabled him to set up the Edward F. Albee Foundation in 1967 to offer struggling artists the time and space in which to work without disturbance. The Albee Foundation’s Barn sits on a peaceful knoll in Montauk, and notable writers and artists including John Duff, Christopher Durang, Will Eno, Spalding Gray, and A.M. Homes have spent stretches of solitude there to focus on their work. 

On Saturday, the playwright’s connection to the South Fork will be further memorialized when the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton dedicates its amphitheater to the memory of Albee, who held several performances there. This would have been the year of his 90th birthday. (See related story on C3.)

Ms. Jackson, now in her ninth decade, is as beautiful as ever, her cheekbones still a marvel. When she won the parliamentary seat in 1992, at the height of her Hollywood fame, her fellow Labour Party members hoped she would bring glamour to the drab of politics. Poppycock, she basically said, and turned up in the House of Commons in sensible Marks and Spencer outfits and never a stitch of makeup. She relied only on that voice, as sharp as broken crockery, that was said to have emasculated her leading men onstage and onscreen, and helped her take home virtually every statuette in the arts world. And with it, she eventually made a stinking enemy of Prime Minister Tony Blair.  That voice is still diamond-cutter sharp; she’s still able to eviscerate anyone in sight. To watch her electrifying presence live on stage is nothing short of a gift.

A pivotal moment in the play comes when A shares a recollection from her youth, a hateful anecdote concerning her rich husband with a glass eye (Albee’s adoptive father had one too), who comes home one day, offering her a glittering diamond bracelet dangling at the end of his erect “pee-pee.”

“ ‘Do you want it?’ he said. ‘Yes! Yes!’ I said, ‘Oh, goodness, yes!’ And he came closer, and his pee-pee touched my shoulder — he was short and I was tall, or something. ‘Do you want it?’ he said.”

A long silence follows her story and A begins to cry before the play segues into the three women becoming A’s consciousness, and only then do we experience a grudging sympathy for the old lady and begin to understand her underlying spite. 

In the midst of this cerebral Armageddon, a nameless, wordless son enters and through some nifty trickery of mirrors, suddenly, the audience is onstage, as well!

Who is really examining whose life here? Must we all be part of this savage slashing away at our innermost selves? It makes for an uncomfortable bit of theater to see yourself up there, no longer a passive viewer, but a participant in Albee’s unblinking view of life, such an abrasive study in loathing and frustrations, of impotence and regret. Mr. Mantello’s use of an illusion cleverly does away with a common illusion that somehow we will be spared that end-of-life reckoning. No chance. Like A’s, it will be brutally fierce. 

And so, by the end, we are harshly reminded of our own mortality. If the experience was intrusive and uncomfortable, it is exactly how Albee meant it to be. For the meanness of life — its cruelty and inadequacy — was always Albee’s business.

“Three Tall Women” will play through June 24 at the John Golden Theatre.