SCRIPT - Three Tall Women : a Play in Two Acts
by Edward Albee
ABOUT THREE TALL WOMEN
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA
Three Tall Women is a two-act play by Edward Albee. It was first performed at the English Theater in Vienna, Austria under the direction of Albee himself and starring American actress Myra Carter, who won several awards for the performance.
In 1994, Three Tall Women made its New York debut at the Vineyard Theater, once again starring Myra Carter. The same year, the play premiered at the Wyndhams Theater in London's West End. The London production, as well as its 2011 revival, were directed by Anthony Page and starred Maggie Smith.
Recently revived on Broadway in a production directed by Joe Mantello, starring two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson and Tony winner Laurie Metcalf
Earning a Pulitzer and Best Play awards from the Evening Standard, Critics Circle, and Outer Critics Circle, among others, when it premiered, Edward Albee has, in Three Tall Women, created a masterwork of modern theater.
As an imperious, acerbic old woman lies dying, she is tended by two other women and visited by a young man. Albee’s frank dialogue about everything from incontinence to infidelity portrays aging without sentimentality. His scenes are charged with wit, pain, and laughter, and his observations tell us about forgiveness, reconciliation, and our own fates. But it is his probing portrait of the three women that reveals Albee’s genius. Separate characters on stage in the first act, yet actually the same “everywoman” at different ages in the second act, these “tall women” lay bare the truths of our lives—how we live, how we love, what we settle for, and how we die. Edward Albee has given theatergoers, critics, and students of drama reason to rejoice.
Edward Albee
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Albee, the American dramatist, was born in 1928. He has written and directed some of the best plays in contemporary American theatre and three of his plays: A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women have received Pulitzer Prizes. His most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.
Albee himself has also received numerous awards for lifetime achievement, Tony Award nominations, and other honors for his contributions to the fields of drama and literature.
His other plays include The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The American Dream, Tiny Alice, All Over, Listening, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun, Fragments, Marriage Play and The Lorca Play.