The Stages of Aging : Playwright Edward Albee Reflects Life Through ‘Three Tall Women’

With “Three Tall Women,” a play first produced in Vienna in 1991, Edward Albee strides into the mature stage of an erratic career. And how better to show off accumulated wisdom and style than by focusing on the two big Ms--Mortality and Mother. It seems fair to speculate that Albee, now 67, has reached a point at which he can begin to understand the adoptive mother from whom he was estranged for most of his adult life. The result is far from sentimental but much more forgiving than this playwright has ever before shown himself to be.

Opening Thursday night at the Mark Taper Forum, “Three Tall Women” is a strange, riveting and sometimes turgid drama, the portrait of a life that, if not well lived, is at least memorably recalled.

Marian Seldes plays the mother, a peevish 92-year-old lady who is attended in her proper, wealthy-widow bedroom by a caretaker (Michael Learned) and a humorless young lawyer (Christina Rouner). The women, who never address one another by name, are denoted in the program, respectively, as A, B and C. A has little to do but reminisce, which she does with erratic grace.

Seldes, who played the role of B in the New York production, employs an aristocratic accent and a voice that soars and swoops like a hawk, floating high and then digging down into the gravel, mirroring her quicksilver emotional changes. One minute she is cackling like a witch, the next crying like an infant over her silver tea service, a moment later pulling herself together with a haughty sucking in of her cheeks. She is an unreliable storyteller but an entertaining one, and the other women listen as they, like us, put together the pieces of this weird, hard, pampered creature’s life.

Seldes has a couple of bad habits that she tends to rely on. After a line on which she expects (and gets) a laugh, she retreats to a gesture, an elaborate sniff or a tongue poked hard in a cheek. She is, and always has been, a mannered performer, but aside from these habits, her theatricality works beautifully for her here. A is a woman who lives in her own world and who, despite her impending death, is a forceful personality. Her former acts of nastiness are tempered by her current, and one assumes, newly acquired ability to laugh at herself.

In the second act, the actresses take on the roles of the dying woman in three different stages of life--at 26 (C), 52 (B) and 92 (A). They share bits of information from across the boundaries of time. In this schematic way, Albee paints the portrait of a life that may have been stingily lived and little understood, a life that seems horrifying to the youngest woman, but one that is fondly recalled by the oldest nonetheless.

As B, Learned seems entirely unrelated to Seldes’ A--she has a maternal air, despite her occasional sharp jibes, and a zaftig figure that in no way seems destined to become Seldes’ bony frame. Her earthiness also bears no relation to the prima donna who is A. Though she appears to stand alone in the middle, Learned clearly enjoys herself and she does indeed seem a rich woman at the height of her powers.

C meanwhile is underimagined, a woman so clueless as to how someone older than herself might feel that she is rendered almost idiotic. Albee seems to have very little insight into this character, the woman who would become his mother. Director Lawrence Sacharow orchestrates the actresses with enormous sensitivity but he can do nothing for Rouner, who founders in the role.

By the time “Three Tall Women” won a Pulitzer in 1994, Albee hadn’t seen a play produced on Broadway since the disaster that was “The Man With Three Arms” in 1983, a bitter rant at the world that drew scathing reviews. This play can be harsh, but it vibrates with the knowledge of how difficult it is, even for one’s enemies, to be human.

At one point, A recalls a scene from the early days of her marriage that rivets all of her listeners. The story begins playfully but ends with her refusal to perform fellatio on her husband, and a sudden rush of tears. She seems to understand her own complicity in the barrenness of her life, the kind of insight that would have been unthinkable for the characters in, say, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“Three Tall Women” is unblinking on the subject of loveless families and old age. But it also has a relenting quality that throws a beautiful sheen on things. The play displays a kind of reflectiveness about human frailty rarely seen in the work of this playwright. Age has not mellowed Albee. It has, however, made him more interested in death and less in the kill.

* “Three Tall Woman,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 24. $28-$35.50. (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

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Marian Seldes: A

Michael Learned: B

Christina Rouner: C

Michael Rhodes: The Boy

Center Theatre Group/Music Center of Los Angeles County/Mark Taper Forum production by arrangement with Elizabeth I. McCann, Jeffrey Ash, Daryl Roth in association with Leavitt/Fox/Mages presents a Vineyard Theatre production. By Edward Albee. Directed by Lawrence Sacharow. Sets James Noone. Costumes Muriel Stockdale. Lighting Phil Monat. Production stage manager Mark Wright.