The play opens Friday at Malibu Stage Company.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
American playwright Edward Albee once said, “A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.” He went on to prove it with such soul-searing (and Tony Award or Pulitzer Prize-winning) pieces as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Seascape” and “A Delicate Balance.”
Starting next week, Malibu Stage Repertory hangs its guts out with Albee’s third Pulitzer Prize-winner, “Three Tall Women.” First produced at Vienna’s English Theatre in Austria in 1991, the play moved to New York and London in 1994, where it won several awards including the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and an Obie (awarded for Off-Broadway productions).
In a Beckett-ian nod to absurdum, the play features three women (who might actually be the same woman at different times of her life)-young (called “C”), middle-aged (called “B”) and elderly (called “A”)-who reminisce about “A’s” long life. Not all of “A’s” decisions in her journey were necessarily good, and she spends her final days juggling memories of pleasure, shame and, most painfully, regret.
Albee has said that this play might be the most autobiographical of all his work and that it was “a kind of exorcism.” Like the son (who shows up silently in Act II), Albee left home as a teenager, trying to escape the hostility of his adoptive New England parents, who disapproved of his homosexuality.
Director Nancy Little said the play asks profound life questions.
“When is our best time in life? How do we experience loss and survive?” Little asked rhetorically. “When I first read the play, I focused on the fact that Albee was talking about his mom. But gradually, I realized that this could be any woman.”
In fact, Albee is noted for writing extraordinarily complex and layered roles for women. In his 1962 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” the role of Martha (played by Uta Hagen, who won the Tony that year, with an Oscar going to Elizabeth Taylor for her role in the 1966 film) is a raging, self-loathing drunk, who in response to the title’s question, answers “I am, George, I am.”
“Three Tall Women” offers uniquely demanding roles to actors as well. Eve Sigall was just coming off a run of the play with Hollywood’s West Coast Ensemble Theatre (playing “A”) when the chance to do the Malibu production came up.
The biggest challenge, Sigall said, in doing the play is, “It is utterly exhausting emotionally. But it is such a dense play and has so much to offer that I realized I wasn’t finished exploring it.
“You have an old woman, facing death, with so much unresolved in her personal relationships,” Sigall said. “She realizes that she didn’t make the best choices and is losing her faculties, so she doesn’t have time to fix it. She is not at peace. In a way, this play is an homage to everyone’s aging parent.”
When asked what advice she would give a younger self, as depicted in the play, Sigall laughed. “Well, I’d try to guide her, but I’m not sure my younger self would listen,” the actor said.
Lauri Christi, who plays “C,” thinks the role might be the “perfect” character for her.
“I think Albee was trying to understand his mother in this play and why she made the choices she did,” Christi said. “In his life and in the play, the older woman becomes estranged from her son and closes down. What we can do to fight those dysfunctional relationships is to try and open up. If one person can leave the theater after seeing this show and go home and call someone they’re estranged from, then we did our job.”
Christi, who has a bachelor’s degree in drama from NYU, said one of the greatest challenges for her was in trying to find the realism within the abstraction that constitutes the second act.
“There’s a lot of active listening on ‘C’s’ part, so I really have to go moment to moment,” Christi said. “We try to find that point where the characters all merge. This play is so profound.”
Alison Coutts-Jordan, who plays “B,” was so impressed with the opportunity to do “Three Tall Women” that she drives round-trip from Santa Barbara for rehearsals and performances, joking that she should “pass the hat” for gas fare.
A longtime alumna of the Santa Barbara Ensemble Theatre, Coutts-Jordan had played in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” years ago and knew the draining nature of Albee’s work, likening the rhythm to that of British playwright Harold Pinter.
“You need to gird yourself with Albee,” Coutts-Jordan said. “Your focus has to be complete. The memorization is difficult and the lines are like arias. An actor has huge responsibility to these lines.”
Little said if there is any lesson to be taken away from “Three Tall Women,” it is that joy and pain contribute equally to the whole picture when looking back at life’s end.
“Every bit of life counts, and every choice will count,” Little said. “I think this is relevant to everyone.”
“Three Tall Women” plays Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Feb. 12 through March 7, at Malibu Stage Company, 29243 Pacific Coast Highway. Tickets and more information can be obtained by calling 310.589.1998 or online at www.brownpapertickets.com