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Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize Winner
THREE TALL WOMEN
February 12 - March 14, 1999
Margo Whitcomb, Bette Laws-LeFevre, Cyndi OwensThanks to Leo Stutzin [Modesto Bee] and Sherman Spencer [Stockton Record] for these glowing reviews:
'Tall Women' brilliant opener for Stage 3 season
By Sherman Spencer - Special to The Record
Like Eugene O'Neill and Neil Simon, playwright Edward Albee sought to sublimate his resentments toward his family by dramatizing them. The result, his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Three Tall Women," provides a brilliant opening work for the seventh season of Sonora's Stage 3 Theatre Company.
Albee had a particularly dysfunctional family experience. Adopted by a wealthy couple, his emotional differences with his foster parents lead to his leaving home as a young man and never reconciling with his adoptive mother.
After his mother's death -- his father died much earlier -- he wrote this play in an attempt to provide himself with an objective explanation as to why she became such a difficult and embittered creature.
The play opens with women A, B and C.
Woman A (Bette Laws-LeFevre), wealthy, 90 years old, feeble, terminally ill and irascible, takes out her resentments on B (Margo Whitcomb). The latter is in her 50s, is apparently A's paid companion, with a mordant sense of humor and tolerant attitude that enables her to deal with A's demanding conduct.
Woman C (Cyndi Owens), a young woman employed by A's lawyer to straighten out her tangled legal affairs, has less patience with the elder woman.
The first act proceeds realistically as the two younger women cope with A's senile behavior as she recites a litany of her earlier life.
In the second act, different time frames and characters merge to present a complex portrait of different aspects of the women. The son (Eric Owens) also appears in a nonspeaking role.
I'd read this play before and seen it performed in San Francisco by a Broadway touring group. Though I enjoyed that performance and admired Albee's novel concept and clever writing, I didn't feel much involved in the action.
The Stage 3 production, with its intimate venue and a heightened emotional content, provided a wholly new dramatic revelation to the work. The characterizations had a validity and vigor that I had formerly found lacking.
Laws-LeFevre is simply magnificent in her role. Physically perfect as a stunning former model, she also makes a convincingly emaciated, near-death nonagenarian.
She prattles about her youth, weeps over her faltering memory and revels in her bigotry. Yet through it all she reveals the strength of will and warmth of passion that make understandable the personality she later displays.
As B, Whitcomb achieves with total dramatic control and credibility the character transformation that supplies the crucial clue to the family's torment.
Fewer dynamic changes are required of Cyndi Owens, but she conveys a completely consistent and effective interpretation of C, as an alternately naive and arrogant young woman.
All three perform together with truly impressive ensemble, an essential skill in this dark comedy of fragmentary lines and mixed emotions.
Equally responsible for the impact of this production is the insightful and incisive direction of Barbara Segal-Mills. She is aided and abetted in this impressive enterprise by Charles Blackwell's appropriately sumptuous set, the fashion-magazine quality costuming of Gail Russell and the subtle, but so effective, lighting of Ron Madonia.
This is a dramatic event not to be missed. - Sherman Spencer
'Women' Stands Tall on Stage 3
By Leo Stutzin - Modesto Bee arts editor
SONORA -- Life happens. So does change. So does death.
In Stage 3's "Three Tall Women," the region's first look at Edward Albee's 1991 masterpiece, life and change and death happen with astonishing vividness. They happen with poignancy, with sardonic humor, with fierce drama. They happen because people make choices, because we avoid choices, because of chance, because of biological inevitability.
Albee portrays that progression of events and responses with a brush that is at once broad enough to touch every one of us, yet precise enough to define the solitary humanity of a single woman. The feat brought him the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards.
If this region offered prizes for achievements in theater, you could bet "Three Tall Women" would walk away with at least two of them, maybe more: best play, best actress in a leading role, possibly best direction and costuming.
I don't expect to see a more compelling production in 1999, or a stronger performance than Bette Laws-LeFevre is giving to the role of a 92-year-old matron. I'm not sure anyone will shape the nuances of a play with more intelligence and finesse than Barbara Segal-Mill has done with "Three Tall Women."
Albee's drama and comedy revolve around characters that he identifies only as A, B and C. The labels sound generic, but the characters are almost invariably very specific, and very alive.
A is 92 (though she insists she's only 91) and frail, beset by infirmities that range from an unusable arm to a barely controlable bladder, and a memory that drifts between lucidity -- with a swift and biting sense of humor -- and vacancy.
And that only gets her through the first, and more realistic, of the play's two acts. In act two, A assumes the jeweled glamour of a John Singer Sargent socialite, and the vitality of a vigorous woman half her age.
B and C undergo lesser transformations.
B is 52, C is 26. The ages are crucial.
In act one, B is a kind of nurse and secretary to A; C is a lawyer who drops by to look over the old woman's financial records.
In act two, both become aspects of A, placing before us at one time three distinct individuals within a single person, interacting with each other:
The young debutante, wondering about happiness, fearing the trials of life that await her, defiantly shrinking from the prospect of age and senility. The middle-aged woman who can look back with amusement at her youthful naivete, with nostalgia at passions she has experienced and options she has renounced in a quest for security, and who can look forward with equanimity to the physical and mental decline that awaits. The old woman who is essentially content with the life she has lived -- sometimes inaccurately remembered -- and content with the prospect of dying.
Laws-LeFevre is simply magnificent as A, a role that is both huge and difficult. Her wide-eyed panic at lapses of memory, alternating with clear visions of times past and with satisfied glee at her own zinging one-liners add up to a triumph of the performer's art. But she is never more poignant than when she starts a bawdy story in cheery giddiness, then carries it to a conclusion -- which slowly comes back -- that reduces her to shock and tears.
Margo Whitcomb, who usually works at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, plays B with superb modulations of mood, and foothill stage veteran Cyndi Owens does justice to the relatively shallow role of C. Eric Owens appears as A's estranged son, a mute role he handles with tenderness. - Leo Stutzin
