Three Tall Women

[foxy]

Coming to NY February 27, Edward Albee's play Three Tall Women starring Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Allison Pill directed Joe Mantillo. Sounds like a hit to me.

[Cooper]

That's an amazing cast.

 

• JOHN GOLDEN THEATRE
  
• 252 W. 45TH ST.
  

On the heels of her triumphant reappearance last season on London’s West End after a 25-year absence, two-time Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson makes her long-awaited return to Broadway alongside three-time Emmy and Tony Award winner Laurie Metcalf and Tony nominee Alison Pill in the Broadway premiere of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Three Tall Women. The play also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Play. Two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello directs.

 

SYNOPSIS: Three women of different ages talk about their lives and their relationships with their families. Gradually it emerges that they may all be the same woman.

 

Performances begin February 27

[foxy]

I finally got to see the play. St. Patrick’s Day might not have been the best day to be in mid-town but I survived.

Glenda Jackson was everything you could want in a brilliant performance. Laurie Metcalf was not far behind. I wasn’t familiar with Alison Pill, but I thought she was good in a less showy role.

The play is quite funny even when being quite serious.

There’s a lush set that does some theater magic with a gigantic mirror that I thought was really interesting.

I certainly recommend the show. So far it’s been at tkts quite a bit but it’s still in previews.

Edited March 18, 2018 by foxy

[edjames]

Seeing this on Thursday evening...

Review: Glenda Jackson Gets Her Queen Lear Moment in ‘Three Tall Women’

THREE TALL WOMEN

1 hr. and 45 min.

Closing Date: June 24, 2018

John Golden Theater, 252 W. 45th St.

 

By JESSE GREEN. MARCH 29, 2018

 

Her jaw thrust forward like a prow, her elfin eyes belying her regal bearing, her wide-screen mouth wrapping itself around those slashing, implacable consonants — they’re all exactly as you remember them and want them to be. Or if you’ve never experienced them, welcome to the pleasure. Either way, Glenda Jackson is back; even better, she’s back in a role that’s big enough to need her.

 

Aptly, the name of the role is A.

 

A is the oldest of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which opened on Thursday night in a torrentially exciting production that also stars Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill. It not only puts an exclamation point on Ms. Jackson’s long-shelved acting career but also serves as a fitting memorial, which is to say a hilarious and horrifying one, to Albee, who died in 2016.

 

Though “Three Tall Women” won him his third Pulitzer Prize, in 1994, and marked his return from the critical wilderness after two decades of disrepute, this is the play’s Broadway premiere. Joe Mantello’s chic, devastating staging at the Golden Theater was worth the wait.

 

The wait for Ms. Jackson seemed less likely to be rewarded. A highbrow star of classy film and television in the 1970s, with two best actress Oscars and a handful of Emmys, she pulled the plug on her acting career in 1992 when elected to the House of Commons on the Labour ticket. That doesn’t mean she stopped performing, exactly,

.

 

But by the time she retired from politics, in 2015, few expected the 79-year-old to show up onstage again. Then came an exhilarating “King Lear” at the Old Vic in 2016, announcing that Ms. Jackson had lost none of her power and verve.

 

So how do you top “King Lear”?

 

In a way, “Three Tall Women” — a comedy about decrepitude or a tragedy about survival, depending on how you look at it — is “Queen Lear” in a fun house mirror.

 

A is a rich old lady, 92 but vainly pretending to be 91: a fossil of the old guard with all the imperiousness, mischief and grit that suggests. She spends most of her time abusing the memory of a bad marriage and an even worse son — worse because gay. Still, you are never sure how much of what she says is true; her grievances, like her racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, seem almost rote.

 

For A, hanging on to a sense of identity means maintaining the enamel shell of her narcissism even as she forgets what she once found so fascinating inside it. Ms. Jackson, in a lilac dressing gown and a marcelled silver wig, digs deep into that contradiction, producing huge laughs from the grim idea that awfulness is a damn good habit as death hovers.

 

The audience for her awfulness, in the first act anyway, consists of Ms. Metcalf as B, her fiftyish seen-it-all caretaker, and Ms. Pill as C, an uptight twentysomething emissary from her lawyer’s office, trying to bring order to a chaos of unpaid bills. Ms. Metcalf, spiky and floppy, is particularly mordant in this material, sometimes bullying and sometimes coddling A in an effort to get through another unpleasant day with minimal fuss. Confined to her employer’s grand bedroom, she is a visual joke, stomping around in gray pants and sneakers.

 

In the new configuration, with the whole cast dressed in coordinated purples — the superb costumes are by Ann Roth — the tone darkens even as the play remains raucously funny. You may never have heard a dirty story about a man’s anatomy told as Ms. Jackson does in the second act, but A, B and C, now a living time-lapse photograph, have more at stake in one another’s success, and more at risk in failure.

 

Perhaps that’s because they are all, in essence, Albee’s mother, who (he always said) bought him from an adoption agency for $133.30 and forever after hoped to return him. “Three Tall Women” is based, in part, on conversations she had with him about her life, marriage and unhappy parenthood. In more ways than one, Albee hovers about the action.

 

But unlike in much of his early work, he does not insist on dominating it. “Three Tall Women” is rigorous but also generous, even loving, to its characters — and audience. It honors the women’s flintiness and fear as C swears not to become B and B hopes not to become A. In doing so, it slips Beckettian existentialism through the commercial barricades by disguising it as comfortable mainstream entertainment.

 

Well, not always comfortable. By the end, when Ms. Jackson gives voice to A’s terror as her faculties wane, and considers the idea that death will be a relief, you may be struck, as I was most recently in the Signature Theater’s revival of “At Home at the Zoo,” by Albee’s willingness to go anywhere. Or rather, his unwillingness not to.

 

That doesn’t mean this is a perfect play. Given the Cubist structure, it’s not surprising that the themes eventually start to recycle with more panache than novelty. And C, as written, does not always stand for compelling.

 

Still, time has been good to “Three Tall Women,” and Mr. Mantello’s production further burnishes its insights and confirms its originality. The staging tricks enhance the ones that Albee built in, with Miriam Buether’s astonishing set design, at first so pretty and cozy, holding unexpected dimensions of alienation in store. The lighting (by Paul Gallo) and subtle sound design (by Fitz Patton) beautifully support the idea of a play slipping identities in the same way its characters do.

 

Finally, though, it comes back to the actors. Ms. Jackson’s history with us, and her aura of indomitability, mean that she is not merely a casting coup for A but a natural advocate for the play’s central themes. She is, politically and personally, the embodiment of not going gentle into that good night; death and Thatcherism are all the same to her.

 

And though Ms. Metcalf and Ms. Pill look nothing like Ms. Jackson, or each other, they bring more important skills and associations to their roles. Ms. Metcalf, once known for tragedy but now transformed into a peerless comedian (thanks to “Roseanne,” “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Lady Bird”), is thus a very Albee creature. And it is not irrelevant, seeing Ms. Pill’s just-holding-it-together C, to think of the devastated young woman she played, under Mr. Mantello’s direction, in the Off Broadway premiere of “Blackbird.”

 

Watching these three women in “Three Tall Women” means seeing the ghosts and echoes of many other women as well. They complete Albee’s imaginative leap into difficult souls, which of course means all of us. And they honor a play that despite its frailties and wrinkles has aged beautifully, into a burning, raving classic.

[+ WilliamM]

The Theatre

April 9, 2018 Issue The New Yorker

A Lost Opportunity in “Three Tall Women”

In Edward Albee’s play, the legendary Glenda Jackson is a gift that the director, Joe Mantello, doesn’t so much squander as fail to unwrap.

By Hilton Als

 

 

Pill, Metcalf, and Jackson play one woman at different stages of her life.

 

Illustration by Sara Andreasson

 

If, for some perverse reason, you feel the need to see female minstrelsy at work, by all means check out “Three Tall Women” (in revival at the Golden, directed by Joe Mantello). Written by Edward Albee and first staged in New York in 1994—it won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama—the play, in this incarnation, stars an English actress I’ve longed to see onstage for all of my viewing life: Glenda Jackson. Now eighty-one, the legendary actress still possesses the energy and the clarity that characterized her greatest film and television performances. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever forget her as the bewildered but staunch lover in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971) or as Elizabeth I in the BBC miniseries “Elizabeth R” that same year, not to mention as Hedda Gabler in Trevor Nunn’s 1975 film version of Ibsen’s play. Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner, is a gift that Mantello doesn’t so much squander as fail to unwrap. As in much of his directorial work, Mantello reconfigures the script to emphasize the fire-and-brimstone moments that he thinks Broadway audiences will respond to: it’s very easy to choose between right and wrong. No matter the intellectual intent or subtleties of a given script, in all the stage work of his that I’ve seen he insists on wagging a finger at the characters’ moral failings.

 

“Three Tall Women” is one of Albee’s most interesting late works; it bristles with unresolved and unresolvable guilt and, finally, with hatred undone. Albee’s earliest plays, such as “The American Dream” (1961), lampooned the American family, and all families that felt they should be protected by the status quo—or by their wealth. Because the women in Albee’s scripts are often the dominant dramatic force, the writer was accused of portraying men in drag. A facile reading of the current production of “Three Tall Women” would be that Albee was a misogynist, but that would be reductive: what if the person you were supposed to love the most was detestable, and happened to be a woman?

 

In his thirteenth full-length play, Albee wasn’t seeking revenge against women, or, specifically, against his mother, whose contemptuous vitriol dogged him throughout his life. Adopted by Reed and Frances Albee when he was two weeks old, Albee was a child of privilege: Reed’s family owned a chain of theatres around the country. Poor but socially ambitious, Frances had grown up longing for the kind of life that Reed could provide: horses, servants, a grand but tasteful place to live. A baby was part of the deal. In piece after piece, Albee questioned or, more precisely, challenged the role that having a child plays in a heterosexual woman’s idea of herself. (Albee, who was gay, rarely wrote gay characters, and one senses that he needed the distance he felt from the straight world in order to speak.) Frances wanted to have it all—marriage, money, motherhood—but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bear the emotional responsibility of mothering anything except her resentment, especially when it came to her milquetoast of a husband and her sharp-tongued son.

 

The power of so many of Albee’s plays, from the underproduced “Tiny Alice” (1964)—a mysterious three-act comedic drama about a corrupting rich widow and the Church—to “Three Tall Women” and “The Play About the Baby” (2001), lies in his attempt to record, without indicting, the horrible sound of his mother’s lullabies: songs about his queerness, his ineptitude, and his failures, supercilious and electric with self-importance and malice. Everything hateful in the world, Albee seems to say again and again, begins with the discrepancy between who we say we are and who we turn out to be.

 

A (Jackson), the widow at the center of “Three Tall Women,” is having none of this. Sitting upright in a straight-backed chair, her mouth a red gash, she knows who she is because she has ended up here, hasn’t she, rich enough to afford B (Laurie Metcalf), her caretaker, and C (Alison Pill), a lawyer who has come to look after her affairs? A is consumed by memory; she is the only pure thing in a world that she has always known to be vile. Who cares that she is anti-Semitic and racist, she is a paragon of—truth? A doyenne of upper-class respectability? Well, now she’s incontinent, and sometimes she can’t remember everything, but when she’s energized by loathing she recalls that her husband loved tall women, and that she could never have oral sex with him, just never could, and how, once, he put a diamond bracelet on his “pee-pee” and she wanted the bracelet but could not bring herself to put that thing in her mouth to get it.

 

Often overlooked in Albee’s work is his engagement with class and his view of marrying up as a form of prostitution. A had no such qualms; her ambition didn’t leave time for morals. And, as she shuffles back and forth to the bathroom with B’s help while C asks questions about her finances, the action grows broader and the laughs get closer together: these usually tremendous actresses are playing to some kind of recorded laugh track in Mantello’s mind—a laugh track that wouldn’t be so glaring if Metcalf, in particular, weren’t so wedded to it. Indeed, Metcalf, a performer whose verve I was excited about in last season’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” relies so much on the tics she developed thirty years ago for the sitcom “Roseanne”—nonchalance, a certain rueful distance—that she actually helps Mantello steer the play away from its deeper implications, which have to do with how we forgive those who made us, even if what they made was a target at which to aim their life’s disappointment.

 

Part of what I loved about Jackson before I ever saw her—I first heard her on a recording of Peter Brook’s “Marat/Sade” when I was a boy—was her voice. It’s one of the great instruments of the English-speaking stage, full of what Norman Mailer called (in reference to Truman Capote) “snide rustlings and unforgiving nasalities.” Jackson provided perhaps my first experience of a woman who didn’t smile to appease men’s fear; she was interested in that fear. Mantello draws on Jackson’s staunchness, but her characterization, like that of the other actors, comes not from inside—or the inside that Albee has supplied—but from previous performances, Glenda Jackson in tough Glenda Jackson roles. Usually a mindful star, she is exploited here for her intelligence, and for her distrust, which has always been part of her style: her performances cut through the smoke and mirrors of “acting” to show us something true and brutal about life and the spilled blood of history. But how much depth can she bring to a production that favors the flash of show biz over the complications of the flesh?

 

In the second half of the play, it becomes clear that A, B, and C are one woman—A—but at different stages of her life. Mantello has directed the actresses to play their roles as though they were, respectively, a sadistic, castrating drama queen, a dour, bitter spinster, and a disgruntled majorette. Thus they parade around Miriam Buther’s rather overdone set like angsty marionettes, which the director uses to distract us from a story that Albee wrote from the heart, complete with fractious questioning, technical finesse, and plain old talent. C refuses to believe that she’ll end up like A, dissolute and despising her own child. Pill overdoes it with the wide-eyed innocence, and, in any case, how can we believe that her character is innocent in a play about cynicism and its ultimate release? As A recalls her life with her detested son, her eyes flash with superiority; after all, she’s a mother, the greatest role onstage and off. But what if you have a son like A’s, an Albee stand-in, who yells “Fake!” and “no!” when the truth fails to reveal itself to his mother. Clearly, A couldn’t take that. If she actually listened to his or anyone’s contradictions, she wouldn’t know who she was.

 

The play ends not with A embracing her visiting son in a warm hug of forgiveness but with her various selves joining hands and exhaling. The dying breath is the start of life, or, at least, of freedom for the artist. In “Three Tall Women,” Albee was also able to explore, indirectly, his own three selves: the queer son, the man longing for love, and the writer, expressing it all on the page, which is another form of love. Dramatists put their words and their hearts in their characters’ mouths, and, when Jackson and the other actresses raise their hands, we want to raise ours, too, but in praise of Albee, who, as a boy in the gilt-edged fakery of his adoptive home, learned the power of bearing witness to the truth, and then speaking it. ♦

[foxy]

I almost never agree with Hilton Als. Often after reading one of his reviews I’m not sure he if liked the play or not. He’s pretty clear in this one.

[edjames]

I don't know what play Mr. Als saw, but I totally disagree with his assessment and comments regarding this production. I saw it last night and I was mesmerized by the brilliance of the acting in this pay. Glenda Jackson is a revelation. At age 81, she commands the stage. All attention and focus are on her character. No ear pieces to feed her dialogue or cues, this woman is a totally consummate actress and never once did I see or hear her stumble or forget a line. Bravo! The audience was in sync with her and you could her a pin drop. The 1 hour and 45 minutes of the show (no intermission) went by in a flash as you witnessed a brilliant ensemble act out this story. And, not to let someone else steal the thunder, Laurie Metcalf holds her own against Ms. Jackson and turns in a A+ performance. Poor Alison Pill has to keep her head above water to try to keep up with the two, but also does a fine job. Tonys all around for the gals. I would suggest the Tony Committee establish an "Outstanding Ensemble" category and let the casts of Angels in America and Three Tall Women battle it out. I don't know if they'll extend this show, so I would suggest immediately going to the website and grabbing a ticket asap!

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Metcalf could read a phone book and I'd buy a ticket to it.

 

She's one of the most underrated actors out there: Comedy, drama, television, stage. She can do it all.

[edjames]

I'd be seated next to you! I Love Laurie!