ARTSMONDAY: Dark Humor Disturbs

Pressed to think of happy events, the main character in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women can only come up with two: breaking her back and dying. Such despair and bleak humor characterizes the play, which plays through March 12 at the Loeb Experimental Theatre.

Directed by Rowan W. Dorin ’07 and Rebecca L. Eshbaugh ’07, Women consists of the interactions between three women in different stages of life: one elderly, one middle-aged, and one young. Never named, the women are listed in the script simply as A, B, and C. In the first act, A, B, and C are a wealthy invalid, her nurse, and an employee of her lawyer, respectively. In the second, they are all A, interacting with herself at different ages.

The humorous first act might be unexpected from a play by Albee (best known for his misanthropic work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ), but the humor is never without an edge. When A querulously issues contradictory demands, prompting her nurse to comically scramble in exasperation, audience members are uncomfortably aware that their laughter is derived from an old woman’s senility. The thin line between humor and pain that Women treads is on full display at the end of Act One, when A delivers an anecdote about her husband that veers from amusing to uncomfortable to simply tragic, all within the span of a couple minutes.

The second act, however, drops all pretenses of dark humor and becomes simply difficult to handle, as the truth behind A’s nostalgic ramblings during the first act becomes apparent. As the characters’ tongues become sharper (the second act largely consists of C asking the other two women to account for why they are so bitter), so do the themes— and the play subtly builds into a warning that one can never truly get beyond past mistakes, except in death.

For instance, the troubling interaction of A with herself at different stages takes place within her head as she lies comatose. Her past selves bring her no comfort; C is horrified at what she has become, and B is casually cruel to both. For Albee, clearly, memories counter-intuitively bring pain rather than comfort in old age.

The actors very ably portray their characters’ struggles with their burdens of anger and recrimination. In particular, Ellen C. Quigley ’07 (A) admirably projects the mannerisms and emotional crisis of old age through the heavy layers of old-woman makeup and mannerisms. Laurel T. Holland ’06, as B, portrays simultaneous pain and cruelty without compromising her character’s hard exterior. Although Michelle A. Chaney ’05 (C) seems to have less to do, since her character largely serves as the catalyst for the revelations of the other two, she makes the most of her character.

Set designers chose a mixture of realistic and dream-like elements for the room that is the center of the play’s action. The combination of the fantastic and realistic here goes a long way to tie the firmly-grounded first act to the more surreal second. Perhaps, the one piece of decoration that falls flat is the series of framed silhouettes of horses surrounding a door. While horses are certainly a motif in the play, their role in the play’s message is not prominent enough to merit such a central placement of the prop in the set. As a result, the decoration’s presence tends to confuse audiences mulling the play’s symbolism rather than add to the action.

Above the set, a series of five panels depicts elegant drawings of moments in A’s younger life as she would like to view them— from walking with her sister to dancing with her husband. As more and more painful facts from her past come to light, the panels rotate to depict crudely drawn, unappealingly sexual images that depict A’s true feelings toward them. While imaginative and effective in portraying A’s inner feelings, the panels were largely redundant, visually underscoring what the play had already said. They neither truly added nor detracted from the overall sense of the play but functioned only to add another layer of unease to the already uncomfortable process of learning the truth about the characters.

Indeed, a sense of the “uncomfortable” is a key concept for the Three Tall Women production. While the first act has moments of levity, the second is unremittingly harsh, culminating in the proclamation that death is the happiest moment of life. If you see Three Tall Women , expect to appreciate the insightful production, but not to enjoy it.

—Reviewer Elisabeth J. Bloomberg can be reached at bloomber@fas.harvard.edu.