Edward Albee

A Casebook

Bruce Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135579548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

From the "angry young man" who wrote Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962, determined to expose the emptiness of American experience to Tiny Alice which reveals his indebtedness to Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd, Edward Albee's varied work makes it difficult to label him precisely. Bruce Mann and his contributors approach Albee as an innovator in theatrical form, filling a critical gap in theatrical scholarship.

1
Three Tall Women: Return to the Muses

BRUCE J.MANN

Three Tall Women (1994) brought new life to Edward Albee. After more than a decade of critical neglect, Albee received his best reviews ever for this remarkable autobiographical drama. Reviewers were fascinated by its inventive design and its main character, a daunting elderly woman modeled on the playwright’s adoptive mother. The play immediately revived interest in Albee’s work and earned the playwright, then in his sixties, a third Pulitzer Prize. In this article, I explore why Albee wrote Three Tall Women, and what motivated him to dramatize the life of his mother. I argue that, while the play itself renewed his career, the act of writing it brought another kind of renewal—internal self-renewal for Albee.

Academic critics have paid little attention to Three Tall Women. Only two articles focus on it, and one commentator is dismissive.¹ Neither critic identifies the type of play Albee has written, which is crucial to its analysis. Three Tall Women belongs to a series of autobiographical dramas, written by playwrights in midlife or later, that includes Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) by Eugene O’Neill and Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) by Tennessee Williams.² Something impels each dramatist to look back to his earliest influences, his muses—the figures, events, and authors that first shaped and inspired him as a writer. He finds them in a realm, deep in his mind, where he stores his formative memories—some of them painful—and this realm becomes the play’s setting. What we see on stage is really a mental landscape at the roots of his imagination where his sense of self was born.

This explains the intensely self-reflective nature of these plays. Each playwright’s muses fill the dramatic world. At every turn, we encounter someone or something that influenced the playwright and, subsequently, found its way into his plays. In Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill recalls his tormented family—his mother, father, brother, and younger self—the prototypes for so many of his characters, and he also evokes his literary muses. By means of echoes and allusions, we sense the presence of Strindberg, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Synge, Dowson, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and even Fechter’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the melodrama in which O’Neill’s father acted. In Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Williams recalls his love affair in Provincetown four decades earlier with Kip, a dancer, who inspired his theme of a lost, ideal love. Woven into the play are unmistakable strands of Rilke and Williams’s beloved muse, Hart Crane. The effect of these personal references is astonishing, like a window opening into the playwright’s inner world.

The effect in Three Tall Women is similar, but still different. The play contains the same resonance as O’Neill and Williams’ plays, but has a less elegiac tone and more energy. Albee is not writing a final statement like Long Day’s Journey and Something Cloudy, Something Clear. His mission is to renew his sense of self, and to do this, he must revisit his muses and reconnect with them. That is why Albee writes about his mother, a larger-than-life figure, whom he portrays as being alternately domineering, childish, funny, and venomous. A difficult woman who seemed unable to love her son, she was Albee’s primary muse—or “anti-muse,” as one commentator dubs her (Gussow, Singular, 18)—negatively inspiring many of his characters and his lifelong war against shallow, entrenched American values and attitudes. Watching her in Three Tall Women, we cannot help but think of steely Agnes in A Delicate Balance, the wife in All Over, and the mothers in The American Dream, The Sandbox, and The Lady from Dubuque (see Brantley 1, 22). Other important muses in Three Tall Women, who are discussed but remain unseen, include Albee’s adoptive father (the “penguin”), his aunt, and his grandmother, who contributed to such characters as Tobias and Claire in A Delicate Balance, the complacent Peter in The Zoo Story, and Grandma and Daddy in The American Dream.

Also evident in Three Tall Women are Albee’s literary muses. He seems to take enormous pleasure in alluding to the works of dramatists who influenced him and shaped his imagination. Albee’s love of Samuel Beckett shows in innumerable ways. At times, his main character sounds like Winnie, the garrulous woman buried in a mound in Beckett’s Happy Days. Krapp’s Last Tape can also be detected; both plays use the situation of a lonely, older figure sifting through memories. As she asks whether her son will come today, Albee’s elderly mother reminds us of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The ghostly quality of Albee’s second act, with the three characters representing his mother at different stages of life, suggests Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, as do some of the ferocious speeches. Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is also echoed; there is more than a touch of Coward’s humor and elegant language here. At times, I also hear the voice of Amy, the aristocratic and controlling matriarch in T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion. Albee’s title, Three Tall Women, reminds us of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and the final tableau, with the women holding hands, mirrors the ending of Chekhov’s play, as well. At other times, Three Tall Women calls to mind such works as Jean Genet’s The Maids, a three-character drama in which two housemaids plot against their wealthy mistress; Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, which focuses on a figure unprepared for death; Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; and works by O’Neill and Williams.

For Albee, O’Neill, and Williams, returning to their muses is not a nostalgic act. I believe it is motivated by a crisis of identity related to aging. Kathleen Woodward has named it “the mirror stage of old age” (109), after Lacan’s mirror stage of infancy; however, the crisis appears to occur in either middle or late adulthood. In the mirror one day, we discover a jarring image of the older person we have become, which we cannot reconcile with the image of the younger self we think we are. This self-division fosters a sense of the Freudian uncanny, according to Woodward (104). But for an artist, this crisis can be more disturbing, even terrifying. Suddenly, he has become an older Other, separated and even estranged from his younger self. Unsure of his identity, he feels lost, lonely, and abandoned, an emotional orphan cut off from his “mother,” the nurturing powers that gave him his sense of self. For the older Albee, the experience must have rekindled disturbing anxieties, because he is himself an orphan.

How is this crisis resolved? Writing in “The Orphan Archetype,” Rose-Emily Rothenberg argues that orphans exploring their own identity should relive the trauma of separation in order to bring out their pain and face the reality of their loss (192). Then, they need to build a stronger “autonomous” self by creatively reconnecting with the mother at her “archetypal source,” the unconscious, to tap into nurturing forces there (192–3). This is what the aging Albee does to overcome his crisis. As early as The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982), Albee seems to be dealing with the anguish caused by his divided self. The main character reflects the playwright in crisis; he is a celebrity confused about his identity, desperately and angrily lecturing a group about his having grown a third arm, which has since disappeared. In Three Tall Women, Albee takes the next step, shaping a new, inclusive self by creatively reconnecting with his mother and his literary muses, powers that gave him his initial sense of identity.

But this is not easily done. The whole matter is complicated by Albee’s troubled relationship with his mother. Frances Cotter Albee was a tall, demanding, wealthy socialite who did not understand her son. Her conservative views and hollow values fueled his rebellion. She all but threw him out of the house when he was about twenty years old, and they remained apart for some two decades, after which he initiated their reunion, coming to visit her and take her out to dinner, for example. Even then, she remained unforgiving. About her final years, he said: “I was a very dutiful and good son. But she never quite approved of me or forgave me for walking out. When she died she almost completely cut me out of her will” (see Gussow, “Statesman,” C22). Given their sad history, how can the playwright reconnect with his mother and renew his sense of self?³

In Three Tall Women, Albee solves the problem. He uses the play to understand his mother, thereby freeing himself from her hurtful treatment. This liberation allows him to develop a stronger “autonomous” self and resolve his crisis. He creates a character in her image—an imperious, vain, and fragile figure in her nineties—and in the first act, he looks at her from the outside. In the second act, he transforms the actresses into his mother’s younger, middle-aged, and older selves so he can explore why she became such a bitter woman. This imaginative approach helps him creatively reconnect with her, and after he relives the shattering scene when she orders him to leave, he experiences a renewing epiphany. During the play, as Albee learns more and more about his mother and what motivated her, he takes away her power to hurt him. At the same time, his own sense of self strengthens, because he can see where he came from and how these events contributed to his development as an individual and a writer.

The play unfolds in an elegant bedroom. Albee names his main character only “A,” and we find her in the company of her thoughtful caregiver (“B”) and a young female attorney (“C”), who is visiting. Almost at once, we realize A is a handful; she rivets our attention. While she looks frail, she is arrogant, combative, and self-consumed. She finds fault with everyone and relishes their imagined comeuppances: “Don’t you talk to me that way!” (6); “Oh, she’ll learn” (22); “You all want something…” (20); “None of it’s true! You’re lying!” (31); “It hasn’t happened to you yet? You wait!” (47). She is also racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic, using such expressions as “a real smart little Jew” and “none of those uppity niggers” (37, 46). Her vanity is breathtaking; she shaves a year off her age (“I’m ninety-one”) and holds court like royalty in her room. In her mind, she is the only one who matters. Everyone else has failed, let her down, or is out to get her. Her former friends broke their “contract” with her by dying (41). Her employees are stealing from her. Her son’s visits are infrequent. Since she cannot have her way, she will spite them all.

Nevertheless, as monstrous as she is, A has our commiseration. At ninety-two, she is deteriorating, physically and mentally. Time has taken a heavy toll on her, and we are inclined to sympathize. In the face of her infir-mities, her tenacity is amazing; she will not give in. For example, she suffers from incontinence, and several times must pad off with her walker to the bathroom to avoid an incident; she “won’t have” “a diaper,” according to B (12). She also suffers from osteoporosis and a broken arm that has never healed; the arm should be amputated, but she refuses and endures excruciating pain. Memory lapses afflict her, as well, along with uncontrollable spells of weeping:

A: (To B; tearful again.) Why can’t I remember anything?

B: I think you remember everything; I think you just can’t bring it to mind all the time.

A: (Quieting.) Yes? Is that it?

B: Of course!

A: I remember everything?

B: Somewhere in there.

A: (Laughs.) My gracious! (To C.) I remember everything!

C: Gracious. That must be a burden. (51–2)

Her isolation also elicits some sympathy. As she shares memories with the other women, we realize how alone A is. Her way of life is gone—big houses, riding at her stables, clubs for the well-heeled, servants and chauffeurs, vacationing at a resort with the likes of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg. She has outlasted her husband and what friends she had. Now only her son is left; but while she yearns for his visits, she is vindictive about him: “He never comes to see me and when he does he never stays. (A sudden shift in tone to hatred.) I’ll fix him; I’ll fix all of ’em” (19).

Helping us respond to A are the other characters, B and C. They serve a choral function, providing commentary on A. However, Albee also designs them almost as stand-ins for his two selves, divided by the mirror stage crisis. C represents his youthful attitude toward his mother, while B represents the attitude Albee’s mature self would like to have. In the New York production, Marian Seldes, who played B, found that thinking of Albee helped her play the character; she even costumed herself in colors and fabrics she remembered the playwright wearing (Seldes, 26). While C expresses shocked disapproval of A, B works hard to keep the seas calm:

A:…You don’t think anything’s funny, do you?

C: Oh, yes; I’m just trying to decide what I think’s really the most hilarious—unpaid bills, anti-Semitism, senility, or… B: Now, now. Play in your own league, huh? (40)

Throughout the play, B often resorts to such phrases as “Let her alone” (41), “Well… what does it matter?” (3), and “And so it goes” (11). She knows everything that C knows about A’s dreadful behavior and beliefs, but she remains suitably detached, above it all, and accepting. Devoted to her charge, self-effacing, inventive, and wise, she is the perfect caregiver. (Is she inspired by Albee’s own Nanny Church from childhood?) Again and again, for example, she supports A’s son, telling A that he does care about her and is a good son in an attempt to alter A’s spitefulness. Her vantage point is just right, and she has a rounded of vision that C lacks:

B: What are you, twenty something? Haven’t you figured it out yet? (Demonstrates.) You take the breath in…you let it out. The first one you take in you’re upside down and they slap you into it. The last one…well, the last one you let it all out…and that’s it. You start…and then you stop. Don’t be so soft. I’d like to see children learn it—have a six-year-old say, I’m dying and know what it means.

C: You ‘re horrible!

B: Start in young; make ‘em aware they’ve got only a little time. Make ‘em aware they’re dying from the minute they’re alive.

C: Awful!

B: Grow up! Do you know it? Do you know you’re dying? (13–14)

Her words are vintage Albee, with a touch of Beckett; but this is because B has the perspective that the older Albee wants to have—on life and on his mother.

If he is to achieve it, Albee must resolve his crisis. In the second act of Three Tall Women, Albee does what Rothenberg argues is necessary: he creatively reconnects with his mother. Thus far, the older Albee really has only observed A. But since she suffers a debilitating stroke at the end of the first act, Albee must now imagine her life himself. In a bold move, he decides to transform C, B, and A into representations of A in youth, middle age, and old age, and he has them meet in A’s bedroom. As these spirits interact and ask questions (the experience is not unlike Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author), each learns what will happen to her or how she has changed over time. Watching them,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Casebooks on Modern Dramatists
• General Editor’s Note
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1: Three Tall Women: Return to the Muses
• 2: Edward Albee: A Retrospective (and Beyond)
• 3: Absurdly American: Rediscovering the Representation of Violence in The Zoo Story
• 4: “Good, Better, Best, Bested”: The Failure of American Typology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• 5 Like Father, Like Son: The Ciphermale in A Delicate Balance and Malcolm
• 6: Forging Text into Theatre: Edward Albee Directs Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
• 7: A Demistified Mystique: All over and the Fall of the Cult of True Womanhood
• 8: The Lady from Dubuque: Into the Labyrinth
• 9: Postmodernist Tensions in Albee’s Recent Plays
• 10: Directing Three Tall Women
• 11: Interview with Edward Albee
• Contributors