Title: Three Tall Women
Author: Edward Albee
First published January 1, 1994
128 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 9780452274006 (ISBN10: 0452274001)
Rating: 3.91
Overview
Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women is a powerful exploration of life, love, and death. The play has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The story follows three women, each at a different stage of life, as they confront their pasts and their futures. With unflinching honesty and humor, Albee examines the universal themes of aging, regret, and redemption.
The characters are vividly drawn, and their interactions are both poignant and hilarious. In the end, Three Tall Women is a moving tribute to the human spirit, and a reminder that we all must face our own mortality with courage and grace.
About the Author
Edward Franklin Albee III, an American playwright renowned for his award-winning works including “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Zoo Story,” “The Sandbox,” and “The American Dream,” is known for his well-crafted and unsympathetic explorations of modern society. His early plays reflected his mastery of the Theatre of the Absurd, which originated in Europe with playwrights like Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco.
Albee’s daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue helped to reinvent post-war American theatre in the early 1960s and inspired younger American playwrights such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel.
Albee’s dedication to evolving his voice is evident in his later productions like “or” (2000), which sets him apart from other American playwrights of his era. His work examines the American Scene and denounces the substitution of artificial values for real ones in society.
It condemns complacency, cruelty, and emasculation, and stands against the notion that everything in the US is perfect.
Editoral Review
Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women is a masterful play that delves into the complexities of identity, memory, and mortality. Known for his potent and often controversial works, Albee wrote this play in 1991, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1994.
A hallmark of his writing, the play is an exploration of the human experience, with universal themes that are timeless and still relevant thirty years later. The play revolves around three women, referred to only as A, B, and C, who represent three different stages of a woman’s life – youth, middle age, and old age.
Through their conversations, they reveal their past experiences, regrets, fears, and prejudices. The play’s setting is minimalistic, consisting only of a bedroom with a few pieces of furniture, allowing the audience to focus on the dialogue between the characters.
Three Tall Women is a brutally honest portrayal of the human condition. Each of the three women is flawed, with their own challenges and struggles.
A is wealthy but lonely, while B’s life is riddled with regrets and C is a bitter old woman who resents her past. The play is a haunting meditation on the inevitability of time, and how memories shape our identities.
Albee’s clever use of dialogue and repetition creates a sense of disorientation and fragmented memory. Each woman seems to remember different details of their shared past, and the audience is left to piece together the reality of their lives.
The play’s structure is also unique, with the first act being a straightforward narrative, while the second act shifts into a surrealistic dream sequence. This structure adds to the play’s power, creating an unnerving and unforgettable experience.
One of the strongest aspects of Three Tall Women is Albee’s writing. His characters are fully realized, with their own distinct voices, quirks, and mannerisms.
The dialogue is sharp and witty, with moments of raw emotion that take the audience’s breath away. Albee’s wit and mastery of language are evident throughout the play, providing a lyrical and poetic quality that elevates the discussion of age, gender, and mortality.
However, Three Tall Women is not without its flaws. Some may find the dialogue too heavy-handed at times, and the play’s themes too bleak.
And while the play’s exploration of gender politics is ahead of its time, there is a notable lack of diversity among the characters. Despite these minor critiques, Three Tall Women is a must-read for anyone interested in theater, gender studies, or the human condition.
It is a timeless play that remains relevant today, exploring the universal themes of time, memory, and identity. Albee’s fierce intelligence and masterful storytelling skills make Three Tall Women an unforgettable experience.
Rating: 9/10
