From Publishers Weekly
Albee's drama of an old woman coming to grips with her life and approaching death earned him his third Pulitzer.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
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. Jack Helbig
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Review
"Stunning ... a masterpiece."
--Time
"A truly moving work ... an undeniably affecting emotional core and a shimmeringly black sense of humor ... essential for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped this influential writer."
--Ben Brantley, New York Times
"Another great play ... a dazzler ... a triumphant return to the town that feted and lionized the young playwright three decades ago."
--Wall Street Journal
"A powerful and moving work, his most emotionally affecting play since Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? ... A memorable trinity of women ... a passionate encounter with mortality."
--Newsweek
"Fine and authentic ... Three Tall Women restores, or confirms, Edward Albee as one of America's leading playwrights."
--New York Observer
--Time
"A truly moving work ... an undeniably affecting emotional core and a shimmeringly black sense of humor ... essential for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped this influential writer."
--Ben Brantley, New York Times
"Another great play ... a dazzler ... a triumphant return to the town that feted and lionized the young playwright three decades ago."
--Wall Street Journal
"A powerful and moving work, his most emotionally affecting play since Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? ... A memorable trinity of women ... a passionate encounter with mortality."
--Newsweek
"Fine and authentic ... Three Tall Women restores, or confirms, Edward Albee as one of America's leading playwrights."
--New York Observer
Book Description
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.
About the Author
Edward Albee, the American dramatist, was born in 1928. He has written and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American theatre and three of his plays: A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women have received Pulitzer Prizes. His most famous play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. His other plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Tiny Alice, All Over, Listening, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun, Fragments, Marriage Play and The Lorca Play.
