Three Tall Women

Albee’s best plays have always walked a line between heightened realism and dark comedy. Even his most surreal works are populated with characters who wouldn’t seem out of place in real life. His 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner runs true to form. It begins as a naturalistic conversation among three women (identified as A, B, and C) from successive generations who meet in a hospital room. Each is undergoing a change from one life phase to another, and each faces her travails and disappointments with lots of Albee’s trademark bitter wit. In the second act, however, the three women become representatives of the same person at different ages (26, 52, late 80s), and their bickering talk becomes a touching internal colloquy about life, love, and the inevitability of loss. Not since Beckett’s brooding meditation Krapp’s Last Tape has a playwright dealt so movingly with the subject of disappointment, aging, and death. – A.L.A. Booklist