Three Tall Women [Hardcover]

Edward Albee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1995

Recovering from the brink of death after venting her frustrations about an unjust world, a ninety-two-year-old woman recounts three stages of her painful life, in an award-winning play by the author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 10,000 first printing. Fireside Theatre Main.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: E. P. Dutton; 1st edition (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525939601
• ISBN-13: 978-0525939603
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,048,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Albee's best work since "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"., November 6, 1998

By 

D. Landrum (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Three Tall Women (Paperback)

This play has imaginatively captured a lifetime of struggles one woman experiences, depicted as three women as the same woman in different ages in her life. Albee uses believable situations that are all easily relatable, emphasizing how we deal with our problems and how we deal with ourselves. I would recommend this play for theatergoers, novel readers and especially students of the theater. "Three Tall Women" should sit on the shelf next to "The Glass Menagerie" and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses". Happy reading!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning and Lyrical Meditation on Growing Old, October 31, 2008

By 

David Keymer "David Keymer" (Modesto CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Three Tall Women (Paperback)

Three Tall Women is Edward Albee's third play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It may be the best play that Albee has written. It balances his trademark ambiguity (dialogue and scenes that seem almost realistic but veer slightly off kilter, into a reality that has sharp and painful edges) with a heartbreaking poetry composed 99% of the ordinary language we all use every day. Three women sit in a bedsitting room: a well-off elderly woman, 90, 91, or 92 depending on who's counting, drifts in and out of reality, falls back on the past in repetitive coda, is never very nice and is occasionally outright nasty in the way she treats her companions; a fiftyish caregiver, her sympathy for her charge worn down by the old woman's complaints and pettiness; a twentyish lawyer, sent to persuade the old lady to cash her checks and pay her bills, and repulsed by her constant tirades and close-minded bigotry. The old woman dominates their conversation. It falls back again and again into monologue, the old lady reliving her past. Watching her behavior, seeing her drift in and out dementia is a wrenching experience, especially for a viewer like me who's already several steps along life's path. I won't tell you what happens later in the play but the second act completely transforms the revelations made in the first act and brings the play to a sad but richly lyrical close.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Triumph--Albee's Best, January 1, 2005

By 

Pintorini (Saint Louis, Missouri United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Three Tall Women (Paperback)

It's unusual for a playwright to produce his or her best work in late-career, but that's what Albee has done in *Three Tall Women.* The essence of Albee's genius has long been his ability to get language to do what he wants, rather than being constrained by what language wants to do. But in *Three Tall Women*, unlike in *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf*, there's something urgent and concrete at stake: what, exactly, was the meaning of a dying woman's ninety-two year life? It's this question that fuels the gripping conflict between the play's three characters, "A", "B", and "C", who represent a single woman at ages 26, 52, and 92.

There is so much in *Three Tall Woman* for brilliant actresses to exploit that the play seems virtually certain to be a hot ticket for as long as live theater exists. It's the kind of play that, if properly cast, could sell out the National Theater of Mars, or a similarly remote venue.