Golden Girls

by Nick Taylor

photo courtesy of Live Arts

A play is a dream you have on a fever. The plot moves in circles. The characters become everyone you know. The speeches are interminable. You think the words will never end. And then the lighting changes, the curtains close, and you are left with something profound.

This is how I would describe Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," currently playing downtown at the Live Arts Theater.

In her program notes, director Bonnie Pedersen compares this play, Albee's latest, to the work of Samuel Beckett, particularly "Come & Go." Like "Come & Go," "Three Tall Women" features three women identified only by a letter. I would say that "Three Tall Women" has more in common with Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," since both deal with problems within a family and between generations. The main parallel, however, is the feeling of dislocation that each play evokes in its audience -- the fever dream, as I call it. As "Long Day's Journey" progresses, the decanter level drops, the Tyler family becomes more depraved, and the audience begins to hallucinate.

So it is with "Three Tall Women." At Live Arts Friday night, my girlfriend swore she saw her grandparents sitting three rows up.

JESSICA: Who does that old woman over there remind you of?
NICK: Which one? There's a lot of old people here.
JESSICA: It's my grandmother.
NICK: Aren't your grandparents dead?
JESSICA: Yes.
NICK: But she just walked out that door?
JESSICA: Yes. You missed your chance. You should have looked when I said so.

A few comments on the above dialogue. First of all, let's talk about the old people. I don't know why -- maybe Live Arts offers a discount to AARP members or maybe because the main character is ninety-one years old -- but the sixty-five-and-up crowd was, to use college admissions terminology, "over-represented."

So you say that a crowd full of antique people detracts from a dramatic performance? Not so! Perhaps the biggest laugh of the evening came when the eldest character ("A" if you're keeping score) describes a scene from her youth involving a diamond bracelet and a hard cock. Oh, what joy did our septuagenarian neighbors take in that! Just to whet your appetite a little more: the same character later tells about the time she screwed the stable boy.

Wait a minute! Did Edward Albee, a Pulitzer Prize winner, steal these gags from TV's The Golden Girls? I seem to remember an episode where Sophia, acting on Blanche's advice, seduces the gardener and then something CRAZY happens! No, this is theater, and as we all know, what is known on TV as "tacky" is in the theater called "irreverent."

So there. I've called the play irreverent. And although it has an identifiable pedigree (O'Neill, Beckett), I think it is a fair label. Like Albee's earliest work such as "Zoo Story," "Three Tall Women" has an experimental flair.

At the end of Act One, "A" has a stroke and falls into a coma. The stage goes black, and when the house lights come on for intermission, we see that "A" is still lying in the bed with her eyes shut. The stage crew runs on and sets up partitions around the bed, blocking our view of "A." When the lights come on for Act Two, the actress playing "A" has been replaced by a lifelike plaster mannequin.

The reason for the substitution is this: although the character remains in a coma throughout Act Two, the actress is needed for another role. All three actresses play alternate roles in this act. These three "new" characters are versions of the characters in Act One, but they exist outside of time, in a sort of atemporal hyperspace.

Albee suggests that the three characters -- "A," who is ninety-one, "B," who is fifty-two, and "C," who is twenty-six -- represent this one woman at three distinct points in her life. Act One takes place in the present, and Act Two takes place somewhere -- in the comatose woman's head, perhaps -- outside of time. At one point, the woman's estranged son comes to visit her, and although he is onstage with "A," "B," and "C," he cannot hear or see them.

The three women argue for an hour or so about the seemingly arbitrary progression of events called life. In the process, they become representations of every person you have ever known. My girlfriend saw her grandparents in the audience; I saw my girlfriend in the ninety-one year old woman.

Albee locates the audience in a place where distinctions between individuals do not exist, where a stranger is indistinguishable from one's grandmother. Call it hyperspace. Call it phlybermace. Call it whatever you want -- the old people ate it up.

Live Arts knows its audience. If you pick the right night to go, you get not only a show but also an informal discussion with the actors and director. This is an entire evening of adult-oriented entertainment for the price of one ticket! Why adult-oriented? Because I am certain that the Live Arts target audience does not include me.

How do I know this? Let's begin with the student-prohibitive $12 ticket price. Twelve bucks is beyond my means. If it is not beyond yours, my number is 977-0268.

The next example of Live Arts' anti-student policy is perhaps best explained in the interrogative.

Question: What do you get when you put theater people together with middle-aged Charlottesvillians starved for intellectual activity?

Answer: English class!

At the aforementioned post-play discussion section, the director asked questions like: "It is widely known that this play was meant as a loose biography of Albee's adopted mother. Critics see this as his attempt to understand a woman he hated his whole life. How does this change your opinion of the play?"

What did she want? Five to seven pages double-spaced by Wednesday?

I wanted to stand up say, "Excuse me. I do this professionally! You people need to get a life or else go back to school, but either way, please don't make me think when I'm off duty." (That's for you, Mr. Edmundson.)

Go downtown if you wish, and don't be afraid to hang with the culture mavens. Go see "Three Tall Women," playing through September 27 at Live Arts, 609 E. Market St. Maybe if enough of us show up they will lower the price.