Albee, Edward
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Edward Albee's Three Tall Women is a remarkable play about an unlikable woman near the end of her long life. By means of its clever structure it dissects her life and character very thoroughly. This woman, identified only as A by the author, is completely unsympathetic but eventually, as understanding grows, she becomes, if not likable, at least comprehensible as a full human being rather than the caricature she at first appears to be. In the first act three characters, simply called A, B, and C hold a long conversation in a richly appointed bedroom. A is 92 years old, terribly fragile, and drifts from lucidity to brief moments of confusion, or indifference, as to her whereabouts. B is a 52-year-old woman who is A's care giver and C is 26, a young lawyer who has been sent by her firm to tend to details of A's estate. In the second act the three very different personalities disappear. A is in a coma (a dummy figure occupies her bed) and the three women now represent A at three different stages of her life. A fourth character, the silent "Young Man," enters later and visits the comatose and, later, dead woman on the bed. The three have a conversation about what is to come for some of them and what once was for others. In the course of the conversation A's character is thoroughly laid out and, though she seems to acquire little in the way of self-knowledge, the audience grasps the root of her being and senses the variety of explanations that account for how this woman
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leased by the contrast between her previous existence and the life she married into. But she does not want anyone to think that she was actually living in any kind of want. She therefore stresses that her father was "an architect," certainly not a profession associated with poverty or even working-class life.
But as A continues her explanation she progressively lowers the status she suggested for her father. She raises the family's status with the word "architect" and then lowers it by saying that he designed furniture. Architects do design furniture but it is only an unsuccessful architect for whom this is a primary descriptor. But then A concludes with "he made it" and this describes a craftsman, thereby moving her father's social position from upper middle class to middle class to working class in a few words; a few words, ironically, designed to keep C from thinking she was ever truly far from her current class. The words, however, are spoken automatically. A does not seem to be fully attending to C and they have the ring of a formulaic explanation given out for decades whenever A felt called upon to explain herself.
The ever-literal C, however, objects and begins to question the word "architect." But B mysterious
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Approximate Word count = 3269
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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