The cast of "Three Tall Women" poses for a portrait at the Philbrook Museum. From left are Rita Boyle, Claudia Teipel and Susan Webb.
KELLY KERR / Tulsa World

Albee's portrait of his mother looks at family, dying and facing life's struggles

The actresses who will embody Albee's "Three Tall Women," the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that is Heller Theater's contribution to Summerstage 2001, agree with the playwright's assessment of his work. Up to a point.

"The best way to describe this play is that it's real life at an odd angle," said Rita Boyle. "He's telling the story of this woman's life, but there's also the sense of her watching herself as her life unfolds."

The life on display is -- more or less -- that of Albee's adoptive mother, whose tempestuous relationship helped fuel the creation of some of Albee's best-known plays, like "The American Dream" and "The Sandbox."

"We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years," Albee wrote in the introduction to the published version of "Three Tall Women," "but I was past all that . . . I harbor no ill-will toward her; it is true I did not like her much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self.

"As she moved toward 90," he wrote, "and began rapidly failing both physically and mentally, I was touched by the survivor, the figure clinging to the wreckage only partly of her own making, refusing to go under."

Out of this desire to capture all these qualities in a play came "Three Tall Women," which earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize for Drama and some of the most rapturous reviews of his career.

"I think this is definitely a classic," said Cyndi Vetter, who is directing the play for Heller Theater. "It's one of those rare plays that you can imagine people doing for eight shows a week for a year, simply because it's that rich a work. It's so multi-layered. Every day we work on it, we find something new in it."

The "Three Tall Women" of the title are three individuals in the play's first act, identified in the script only by letters. A (Boyle) is a woman in her 90s, upon whose body and mind time has wreaked all manner of havoc.

With her is a caretaker and companion, B (Claudia Teipel), whose attitude toward her charge is sympathetic and straightforward. The third woman, C (Susan Webb), is a representative from a law firm, who views A's condition with the impatience and horror of youth.

The first act ends when A suffers a stroke; in the second act, the three individual women have become one -- A at different stages of her life, at age 26, 52 and 91. And their memories of A's life -- the marriage, the adulteries, the struggles, the triumphs -- become a tapestry of past and present and future, of longing and regret, anger and peace.

"I read the play a couple of years ago, and thought it was good," Boyle said, "but you read a play very differently when you're performing it. On the page, Albee's language looks natural, even simple. Then you start trying to speak it, and you realize how precise and how dense it is. You almost have to diagram the sentences out to see how they work, how all the clauses and asides fit together."

"It's almost like doing two different plays," Teipel said. "We have to change characters, clothes, even posture from one act to the next. That's true even for Rita, although she's really playing the same character."

"We definitely follow Rita's lead in how we play the characters in the second act," Webb said. "Claudia and I try to pick up some her mannerisms -- the way she sits or holds her hands. We just have to be careful not to use them during the first act."

Because the play is autobiographical (a fourth character, referred to as The Son, makes a wordless but important appearance in the play's second act), part of the cast's preparations involved learning as much as they could about Albee and his mother.

"He certainly captured her in this play," Teipel said. "There are some things that she says that are taking directly from her life -- not just the events, but the words she used to describe those events. We had a lot of reality to work with."

"Still," Boyle added, "he does include some very revealing, softer moments about his mother. It's as if he's saying, `I never saw these qualities when you were alive, but I'll give you this now.' It must have been a cathartic experience for him to write this."

Performing the play has also become something of a catharsis for the cast. The frank monologues about intra- and extra-marital sex have caused a stir during some rehearsals -- Webb recalls a repairman working in the building who lost all interest in what he was doing as she recited one particularly graphic speech.

But the play is also challenging on an emotional level, as it deals directly with our fears about growing old, growing weak, looking back, facing death.

"And that's why this play needs those moments, those scenes where the audience titters a bit," Boyle said, "because this can be pretty heavy going at times."

"This play strikes a chord with all people, because it's about a part of life that all of us have to confront at some point in time," Vetter said. "We all have to deal with family issues, we all have to deal with loved ones dying, we all have to make the best out of the life we've been given."

When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday and Aug. 16-18; 2 p.m. Sunday and Aug. 19

Where: Liddy Doenges Theater, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Second Street and Cincinnati Avenue

Tickets: $8 general admission, $6 students and senior citizens, available at the PAC ticket office, 596-7111; and the PAC Web site www.tulsapac.com.

NOTE: "Three Tall Women" contains adult subject matter and language.