Three Tall Women

Three Tall Women
by Edward Albee

Three Tall Women
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Book Summary Information

Author: Edward Albee
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-09-01
ISBN: 0452274001
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Plume

Book Reviews of Three Tall Women

Book Review: A Stunning and Lyrical Meditation on Growing Old
Summary: 5 Stars

Three Tall Women is Edward Albee's third play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It may be the best play that Albee has written. It balances his trademark ambiguity (dialogue and scenes that seem almost realistic but veer slightly off kilter, into a reality that has sharp and painful edges) with a heartbreaking poetry composed 99% of the ordinary language we all use every day. Three women sit in a bedsitting room: a well-off elderly woman, 90, 91, or 92 depending on who's counting, drifts in and out of reality, falls back on the past in repetitive coda, is never very nice and is occasionally outright nasty in the way she treats her companions; a fiftyish caregiver, her sympathy for her charge worn down by the old woman's complaints and pettiness; a twentyish lawyer, sent to persuade the old lady to cash her checks and pay her bills, and repulsed by her constant tirades and close-minded bigotry. The old woman dominates their conversation. It falls back again and again into monologue, the old lady reliving her past. Watching her behavior, seeing her drift in and out dementia is a wrenching experience, especially for a viewer like me who's already several steps along life's path. I won't tell you what happens later in the play but the second act completely transforms the revelations made in the first act and brings the play to a sad but richly lyrical close.

Summary of Three Tall Women

Earning a Pulitzer and three Best Play awards for 1994, Edward Albee has, in Three Tall Women, created a masterwork of modern theater. As an imperious, acerbic old woman lies dying, she is tended by two other women and visited by a young man. Albee's frank dialogue about everything from incontinence to infidelity portrays aging without sentimentality. His scenes are charged with wit, pain, and laughter, and his observations tell us about forgiveness, reconciliation, and our own fates. But it is his probing portrait of the three women that reveals Albee's genius. Separate characters on stage in the first act, yet actually the same "everywoman" at different ages in the second act, these "tall women" lay bare the truths of our lives?how we live, how we love, what we settle for, and how we die. Edward Albee has given theatergoers, critics, and students of drama reason to rejoice.

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