Three Tall Women
From 18 February 2002
To 23 February 2002
by Edward Albee
Description
A powerful drama for which Albee won his third Pulitzer Prize. When a crotchety old woman suffers a stroke, we see the stages of her life in flashback: her youth, her powerful middle years, and her wise old age. This honest examination of one woman's life is a delicate yet hard hitting drama of morality and destiny. Edward Albee's finest theatrical achievement since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
This amateur production is presented by arrangement with Josef Weinberger Ltd.
Notes from the director
"The play deals with adult matters in a frank way"
The loss of faculties and function that sometimes comes with old age seems to be one of the few remaining areas of life that our sophisticated society is still unable to control - sometimes sanitise.
However, in Three Tall Women, Edward Albee does not evade or cosmeticise the inevitability of death. Instead he confronts it with a clear eyed and ruthless view of the decay of old age and finds an ultimately savage and uplifting resolution.
Albee is on record as saying that the incident that sparked off the long gestation period of the play, took place when he was only 3 years old, and involved his adoptive mother. He also adds that he did not wish to write a "revenge play" as he did not feel the need for it - neither was he interested in "coming to terms" with his feelings for her, nor in self-catharsis. Rather, we are told, it is an objective play about a fictional character who resembled in every way, in every event, someone he had known very, very well.
Three Tall Women won the author his third Pulitzer Prize, and had been generally heralded as marking his return to the passionate straight talking of his best, early work, and in particular Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? We hope it stimulates your own thoughts.