No Ordinary ‘Women’ : Award-Winning Work--at ART in Santa Ana--About a Complex Matriarch Reveals a Mellower Albee

There’s no doubt Edward Albee has mellowed in his later years; he’s admitted as much in interviews. “Three Tall Women” is a telling example of this.

You can follow an arc from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Albee’s acerbic masterpiece from the earlier days, to the more compassionate “Three Tall Women” to document the change. The award-winning play (it won Pulitzer and New York Drama Critics’ Circle prizes in 1994) doesn’t paint Albee as an old softy, but it does show a different kind of wisdom.

This unusual drama, now in director Laurie T. Freed’s mostly satisfying staging at the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana, is an autobiographical reflection on the author’s stepmother. By Albee’s account, she was petty and prejudiced but also often brave and honest. In short, inescapably, infuriatingly human.

Myrna Niles plays the mother, whom we first see at 92, living out her days in one bedroom, a small world of a bed and a few chairs given a look of simple elegance by designer D. Silvio Volonte. She charms and annoys her caretaker (Jeanne Dubuque Walters) and an impatient lawyer (Peggy Johns-Campbell) with her swings from girlish tease to angry martinet to helpless child.

The characters, who are named simply A, B and C, spend the first half of “Three Tall Women” setting the tone for the more revealing and interesting second act. We learn in the beginning that the old woman may have had an unusual, even eventful, life, and we’re curious to find out how she reached such an end.

After intermission, the actors have been transformed into the stepmother, but at different ages. C (Johns-Campbell) is 26, B (Walters) is 52 and A (Niles) remains old, but it’s unclear just how old, since she is now healthier and more capable.

Watching them interact, we see how naivete and giddiness have devolved into bitterness, which, in turn, has become a hard acceptance of the death that is imminent. Albee is hunting big game this time around--mortality and how we deal with it.

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You can get lost following him, if only because the woman’s life is so banal. That may be Albee’s point, that most lives are unremarkable when scrutinized closely, but to learn that she enjoyed riding horses and had a messy affair with the groom to hurt her husband only underlines how mundane she could be.

That leaves “Three Tall Women,” despite its emotional strengths, rather turgid in patches. The challenge for Freed and her actors is to enliven these times, at which they are reasonably successful. There are excesses, especially in the first act, but the performances are more assured as the second gains momentum.

Niles fares best, although there are false moves early on when she portrays the worst of growing old, from the numbing forgetfulness to an array of dignity-robbing infirmities. Later, she shows authority as sort of a darkening sun that the younger women must revolve around and answer to.

Walters and Johns-Campbell respond smartly, often having close to the same facial expression or speech inflections as they recall events, such as when they passionately remember their first sexual experience with a handsome seducer. This helps make the link between the women believable as we try to imagine that they are, indeed, images of the same person.

* “Three Tall Women,” Alternative Repertory Theatre, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends Nov. 6. $22 and $25. (714) 836-7929. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Myrna Niles: A

Jeanne Dubuque Walters: B

Peggy Johns-Campbell: C

Jesse Cash: Son

An Alternative Repertory Theatre production of Edward Albee’s drama. Director: Laurie T. Freed. Set: D. Silvio Volonte. Lighting: David C. Palmer. Costumes: Gina Davidson. Sound: Craig Wesley Brown. Stage manager: Jen Frauenzimmer.