2022: Three Tall Women

 

 Three Tall Women by Edward Albee.  Chaika Theatre Co at ACT Hub, Kingston, Canberra, May 11 – 21, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 12

Director – Sophie Benassi
Movement Director – Ylaria Rogers
Stage Manager – Sophia Carlton
Production Manager / Stage Manager Mentor – Bel Henderson
Set and Costume Designer – Sophie Benassi
Lighting Designer – Stephen Still
Sound Designer – Neville Pye
Show Photography – Jane Duong Photography

Cast:
Lainie Hart (Nurse / Woman at 52) , Blue Hyslop (non-speaking Son), Karen Vickery (Dying Woman / Woman at 90) and Natasha Vickery (Lawyer / Woman at 28)

To review this production of such a significant play I need to write almost separately about the production design and performance by Chaika from my criticism of the play itself.  Chaika writes in their program “Three Tall Women is a consummate play by Albee – compelling, witty and poignant in turns, a ‘pearl-handled dagger of a play’.”

I agree that it is a ‘dagger’, but will say further about my interpretation after saying that the design and performances are top class.  

Sophie Benassi has arranged the staging very well in the Causeway Hall, with the bedroom (for dying and dead bodies – and the visiting Son) behind and above the lounge room setting, for ‘conversation’ – with beautiful furniture, obviously made by the Woman’s ‘architect’ husband.  

The only fault – in the Hall – is that the seating is not fully raked as it needs to be so audience in every row can see over the people in front of them.  I hope The Hub, as it grows as a permanent theatre venue, will be able to fund flexible raked seating for different configurations.

All three actors captured the fine detail needed – in voice, and movement (from the stiffness of the very old to the eye-roll of the young) – to create marvellously defined characters.  In the first hour-long half, Karen Vickery as the near- and finally dying-old woman is a tour de force in her own right, in a semi-dementia role full of lapses of memory, of paranoia, and anger at her own lapses and those she perceives in others.

In the second half, Lainie Hart’s determination at 52 to be happy, and especially Natasha Vickery’s tears as, at 28, she is forced to contemplate her unlikely to be happy future, match Karen Vickery’s not-yet-dead all-knowing old woman.  This is ensemble playing at its best.

To see this production, therefore, is highly recommended.

But then, as Shakespeare wrote, “the play’s the thing…”
It’s often said that every play is autobiographical in some way.  It’s certainly true of Three Tall Women, as Albee said in several interviews.  His adoptive mother, Frances (he knew at the age of 6 that he had been adopted very soon after birth) was a shop assistant who married into the wealthy Albee theatre family to become described as a ‘socialite’.
[Read more at http://edwardalbeesociety.org/biography/ ]

Wikipedia records:
[  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee  ]

Albee left home for good in his late teens [as does the Son in the play]. In a later interview, he said: "I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son, either." In a 1994 interview, he said he left home at 18 because "[he] had to get out of that stultifying, suffocating environment." In 2008, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that he was "thrown out" because his parents wanted him to become a "corporate thug" and did not approve of his aspirations to become a writer.

At
[  https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1999-01-15-9901150716-story.html  ]

under the headline ALBEE'S MOTHER LIVES ON IN `TALL WOMEN'
Frank Rizzo; staff writer for the Hartford Courant, Jan 15, 1999 wrote:

“Some writers look back at their mothers with nostalgia, others with regret.

“Then there's Edward Albee, who looks back with his version of the truth, seeking neither forgiveness, understanding nor revenge.

"I had a subject I didn't want to write about until after she died," Albee says in a phone interview from his home in Florida. "That play obviously was coming together all my life. I think about my characters a long time before I trust them in my plays. I don't start writing them down until they have a life of their own. But [after her death], it was time to write it. Maybe I couldn't make it coherent until after she died."

Watching the play, particularly reacting to Karen Vickery’s full characterisation in Act 1, I could not help but see the play as revenge.  Albee’s mother died in 1989, when he was sixty-one, and no longer the absurdist play writer of his earlier years –  The Zoo Story (1959), The Sandbox, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962).  

Three Tall Women was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, perhaps because of the intensity of his representation of his mother as a superficial bigot, but I found the hour-long focus on her interminal reminiscences and flashes of entirely self-centred aggression dominated the scene, leaving the other two characters as no more than foils for her bitterness.  In the second half the three versions of his mother, as he imagined her at 28, 52 and around 90, at least formed a more balanced presentation of their characters.  He, himself, appears only at his mother’s death, with no dialogue; while she remembers him (apparently after her death) as kissing her forehead only for show, because the nurse and lawyer would have been watching.  

This ‘memory’ is Albee’s invention – and what a bitter invention it is, by a 62-year-old strictly homosexual man about a mother who, it seems from some of what she says in Act 1, must have rejected him at 18 partly because of his sexuality as virulently as he rejected the family and left home – which, in his play, she complains about.

I hoped, since I had not read or even known about this play before, that I could find intimations of future feminism in it.  After all I had always been impressed, since my teenage readings in the 1950s, by Bernard Shaw’s strong support in his dramas for independent women.  Perhaps I could interpret Albee’s mother’s bigotry, and acceptance that every man is a sexual predator, while also agreeing in Act 2 that women all gave in to male demands – as well as only having affairs themselves out of boredom and revenge for their husband’s dalliances – for financial support; perhaps I could think Albee was saying to women, don’t accept the roles imposed upon you.

But none of the three tall women that he creates in this play offers any hope of change.  At 28, when told by the other older versions of herself what will happen to her, all she can do is collapse into tears.  I can only conclude that Albee could not imagine anything like modern feminism – in 1990!

So while I take it for granted that these women directing and performing, having set up an independent theatre company, are doing what is perfectly normal – as well as at an entirely professional standard – I’m left to wonder about this play by a man full of bitterness.  The women’s performances were certainly compelling, but there is little wit and poignancy.  I didn’t see the pearl handle on this dagger of a play.  Just the dagger.

Karen Vickery, Lainie Hart and Natasha Vickery
in Three Tall Women by Edward Albee, Act 1
Chaika Theatre Co

© Frank McKone, Canberra