Mommie fearest

Edward Albee's vain and chilly mother makes for good NETC theater

by Steve Vineberg

THREE TALL WOMEN

By Edward Albee. Directed by Bill Sigalis and Charles J. Grigaitis Jr. Set designed by Christine Weinrobe. Lighting by Tom Powers. With Ruth Bolton Brand, Linda Oroszko, Shannon Cunningham, and Jeff Wright. At the New England Theatre Company, Paxton, through May 20.theater

Three Tall Women, NETC's season closer, is the play that resuscitated Edward Albee's career in 1993, three decades after his previous major success, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He had been America's first significant purveyor of the theater of the absurd, but after Virginia Woolf, a hit on stage and screen, his plays became cerebral and unpopular -- first with audiences, and then with critics. But Three Tall Women has a vitality and an emotional underlayer absent from his other plays, no doubt because it was inspired by his mother, who died in 1990, a year before he began to write it. Frances Albee had been an unforgettable character -- an icily elegant WASP whose life Edward walked out of as a young man, resuming contact with her much later, after she was widowed and had slipped into old age. Mel Gussow's biography, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, identifies her in earlier Albee plays (especially A Delicate Balance), but she's the heart of Three Tall Women, which is propelled by her son's unresolved feelings about her. She's appalling -- vain and bigoted and chilly -- and she's also, in some undeniable way, admirable: staunch, frank, her gleaming wit and sense of irony unassailable by the ravages of living into her 93rd year. She must also be one of the few great roles ever written for an aging actress. (Myra Carter played it, triumphantly, in the original New York production; Maggie Smith in London's West End.)

The play's structure is intriguing. In act one the old woman (Ruth Bolton Brand) interacts with a middle-age attendant (Linda Oroszko) and a young lawyer (Shannon Cunningham) sent by the firm that represents her to create order out of the chaotic state she's allowed her papers to lapse into. At the end of the act, she has a stroke, and when the play resumes after intermission she has been replaced in her deathbed by a doll -- in Bill Sigalis and Charles J. Grigaitis Jr.'s production, it's a kind of stuffed death's head -- mourned by her silent son (Jeff Wright). Meanwhile, Albee shifts the two younger characters into the roles of earlier incarnations of the old woman: the protagonist at 26, carefree and "keeping an eye out" for the man of her dreams, and at 52, wised up by life but still buoyant. And the 92-year-old is on hand once again, bantering with her younger selves. The 26-year-old teeters between refusing to believe she could ever grow into either of her elders and demanding to know how her life boomeranged into theirs. It's a terrific piece of work. You can see the influence of Beckett (Endgame and Rockaby), but the play has its own brittle humor; it's the only Albee play that's ever made me laugh out loud (though the jokes are very dark and often mean).

In the first act of the NETC production, Sigalis and Grigaitis make the mistake of treating the play like a piece of realism: the performances of the two younger actresses seem insufficiently stylized. But Ruth Bolton Brand, reading the old woman's whining, entitled pronouncements and razor's-edge insults in a pampered voice -- almost a baby voice -- is so commanding in the role that she sweeps everything before her. Brand is so emotionally right that you stop worrying about the physical limitations of the staging; in fact, you're grateful that the directors have simplified the action on Christine Weinrobe's intelligently understated set because you can concentrate on the remarkable monologues Albee penned for this character. Anyway, by act two Sigalis and Grigaitis appear to have the style well in hand. In the New York production, the second act felt over-conceptualized and a little tinny; here it's the place where the show takes hold. Linda Oroszko shapes the comedy-of-manners persona of her first-act performance into a genuine character; and Shannon Cunningham, who seemed too pouty and single-note in act one, both softens and sharpens in act two. (Only their physicalization of their roles -- like Brand's -- remains tentative and unexplored.) No one is credited in the program with dressing the three women, but their costumes in the second half aren't simply catch as catch can -- they complement Albee's striking protagonist in the three stages of her evolution.

I've been hard on NETC in the past -- on its play selection and what I've seen as a tendency to put up shows without fully comprehending what those shows demand. This time out, however, the company has taken on a difficult project, cast it well, and carried it off. A play without illusions about aging isn't an easy sell to an audience weaned on Neil Simon and Agatha Christie and Nunsense, and it must have occurred to the company that it might alienate subscribers. (The three women sitting next to me fled at intermission.) NETC should be commended for taking a big risk and having the smarts to make the risk worthwhile.