Three Tall Women

Acclaimed playwright Edward Albee won his third Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1994 play Three Tall Women. An exploration of three stages in the life of a fierce, domineering, and sometimes terrifying woman, the two-act play is often seen as Albee’s response to his relationship with his difficult – but also compelling – adoptive mother, Frances. Because of the connection between the play’s triptych of female characters and Frances, Three Tall Women has been described as Albee’s most autobiographical play. Like the play’s sole male character, the son of its protagonist, Albee left home at eighteen after his mother’s refusal to accept his homosexuality.

The play features four characters, only three of whom have speaking roles: A, an almost insufferable ninety-two-year-old woman from a privileged background, is now suffering from dementia; B, the longsuffering fifty-two-year-old caretaker who guides A through the aspects of daily life A is no longer able to perform on her own; and C, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer who has been sent to tie up A’s complex paperwork by A’s white-shoe law firm. In the play’s first act, these women are distinct characters, but in the second act, three are transformed into representations of A at different points in her life. The fourth character is The Boy, A’s son, who appears on stage but doesn’t have any lines.

Act I takes place in a “wealthy” bedroom that belongs to the increasingly senile A. A thin, autocratic, and proud woman, she spends long and meandering monologues discussing her happy childhood, miserable marriage, and disappointing son from whom she is estranged because he is gay. While her husband’s endless affairs and early death make viewers empathize with her, A quickly shows her true colors through her bitterness, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. What little of her identity remains intact despite her dementia revolves around narcissism and self-pity.



While A tells stories about her life, B spends the act humoring her with a resigned air. B helps A to sit down, go to the bathroom, and get into bed – it is clear that she doesn’t enjoy her job, but she is trying to make the best of it. The self-assured but also prickly and slightly nervous C can barely get a word in edgewise, but when she does, it is to argue with A about A’s illogical statements and leaps of logic. B tries to stop C from doing this, mostly because arguing with A will make B’s job of getting her through the day harder. In the middle of one of her stories, A starts weeping and has a stroke. Act I ends.

Act II opens with an, not at first apparent, substitution. A is ostensibly now lying in bed with a breathing mask over her mouth and nose, but the audience soon realizes that this is actually a mannequin standing in for the stroke-stricken woman. In this Act, A, B, and C are no longer individual people; instead, all stand for a version of A from different times in her life. All are now dressed in similar clothing. In this Act, A is no longer senile but mobile and coherent.

In this act, C and B learn what the future holds for them – in short, nothing good. At the same time, the audience finally gets a much clearer insight into A’s life story. C is horrified to learn that she will marry a short man who will cheat on her and then die after a protracted bout of prostate cancer. In retribution for his many affairs, she will have an affair with their horse groom, but to her horror, her son will walk in on the two of them. Her son will reveal his homosexuality, of which she will deeply disapprove, and the two will argue about his choices until her son will walk out of the family for good. They won’t speak for twenty years, he won’t come to his father’s funeral, and he will only return to see his mother when she falls very ill.



As A is ranting about her son’s behavior, which is in her and B’s past, but in C’s future, A explains that although she accepted his return into her life, she never forgave him for not being the child she wanted. At this point, The Boy walks on stage, sits down next to the mannequin. To him, this body is his mother, and he cannot see A, B, or C. A and B are deeply discomfited by his presence, but C doesn’t know who he is – she is the woman before the woman became a mother. When A starts addressing her complaints about her son directly to The Boy, he cries and leaves the stage.

The play ends with A, B, and C trying to put their finger on the happiest time in the woman’s life. A gets the last line, welcoming her oncoming death, “That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.”