Three Tall Women
Written by Edward Albee
Directed by Charles Newell
At the Court Theatre, Chicago
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on Jan. 20, 2011
This play must be great because Edward Albee wrote it. Or because it dares to describe sexual moments vividly. Or because the emotions are raw. Or because it bravely confronts the reality of death. But these factors do nothing more than to slap a thin veneer of profundity on a hollow, transparent melodrama trying too hard to be something it's not. As one of the greatest playwrights in American history, Albee has given us the masterpieces A Delicate Balance, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Lady from Dubuque, each of which soars universes above Three Tall Women. The fact that Women won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama just testifies to the uncritical elevation of emotionalism over emotion, of tackiness over genuineness, of self-righteousness over circumspection.
The three classics I mentioned above, Balance, Who's Afraid? and Lady, all challenge us with questions they don't answer and with puzzles from which pieces are missing. As I've said in previous reviews, one hallmark of skillful writing lies in bringing the audience to a critical epiphany without ever confirming it. In Women, however, the characters directly tell us what they think, with no teasing from the implicit, the unspoken, or the nebulous. The puzzle in this play -- and there's only one -- has no missing pieces. Women is didactic rather than Socratic, and, consequently, it lacks the power of Albee's tours de force.
That one and only puzzle swirls not around Albee's message, assuming there is one, but around its delivery: who are the three women and how do they relate to each other? Once the answers crystallize, there's no more struggle to appreciate or understand what the women are telling us. The play becomes a triptych of tired, highly predictable, age-typical attitudes: there's the standard burst of youthful naivete by a 26-year-old, the whining rant by a jaded 52-year-old, and the boring sermon by an ostensibly wise nonagenarian. There's no mystery in the existential conclusions the elderly woman draws about life; her philosophizing leaves no blanks to fill in and no missing material to discover. This play is style rather than substance.
The vulgarity in this work is a curiosity. To the pseudo-sophisticate, flippancy or insouciance toward sex is a sign of urbanity, like mindless obedience to the rule about drinking white wine with fish or chicken. I can hear it now. "Gee, Mr. Albee, look how urbane I am for not wincing like a bourgeois dolt." When the treatment of matters sexual is artless and graphic, as in this case, it becomes a cheap device for getting giggles, a lazy appeal to whatever pseudo-sophistication may exist out there in the audience. Such writing insults one's intelligence, dropkicks wit right out of the auditorium, and balks at maturity. I should hear it now. "Gee, Mr. Albee, I'm a grown-up and a sexual being, but I'm no longer an adolescent bag of bouncing hormones." Great theatre, like great literature, doesn't throw me in the river -- it brings me up to the bank.
Questions about sexuality are ideal fodder for the theatre, speaking practically, and important discussion-starters, speaking morally. How many great American playwrights have handled these issues masterfully? Who's made the point effectively? Albee himself, for one. And Tennessee Williams. The list goes on and on. When theatre starts to believe that its greatness lies in its literal point-to-point correspondence with reality, then its raison d'etre disappears. When what's on stage is the same as what's everywhere else around me, then the only reason to continue going is simple entertainment. And what's wrong with entertainment? Nothing. In fact, I love Lucy.
In my opinion, the performances in this production, as my gentle reader might have surmised by now, didn't redeem the play. The characterizations were cardboard: not one of them was anything other than what one would expect from a template of gender and age across the 20th century. Lois Markle's old woman was cranky, forgetful, and erratic in the first act, and calm, poised, and maternal in the second. She was neither surprising nor interesting. Mary Beth Fisher's middle-aged woman was sardonic, contemptuous, and bitter. Maura Kidwell's young woman was dizzy, self-indulgent, and easily spooked. And Joel Gross, who played the boy, although he didn't speak even one word, gave us a performance so contrived and corny that I had to suppress a laugh. Give me Lucy, please.