Tag Archives: Miriam Buether

THREE TALL WOMEN

Laurie Metcalf helps Glenda Jackson to her favorite chair as Alison Pill looks on in Three Tall Women (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 24, $47 – $159
threetallwomenbroadway.com

Edward Albee’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Three Tall Women, is finally making its Broadway debut, in an elegant, exquisitely rendered production directed by Joe Mantello at the Golden Theatre, featuring American actress Laurie Metcalf, Canadian actress Alison Pill, and British legend Glenda Jackson. The two-act intermissionless play, an ingenious depiction of aging, among other things, takes place in the 1990s in the lush bedroom of a sneering, wealthy widow identified in the program as A (Jackson), who is in her early nineties. She lives with her wisecracking, pessimistic caretaker, B (Metcalf), who is fifty-two. They have been joined by the deadly serious C (Pill), a twenty-six-year-old sharply dressed lawyer who needs A to sign some forms she’s been ignoring. Each woman represents a different class and generation, youth, middle age, and old age, each with different values, desires, and expectations, but as B likes to point out, everyone is on their way toward death. “Start in young,” she says, referring to children. “Make ’em aware that they’ve got only a little time. Make ’em aware that they’re dying from the minute they’re alive.” Amid visits to the bathroom, anecdotes about the past, and legal papers to be signed, the women deliver rapid comebacks with plenty of snark as they consider the state of their lives. But then a paradigm shift occurs, and in the second act there is a slight but key change in the set and in the characters, who are no longer quite what they were previously. Once the audience realizes what is happening, there are likely to be more than a few thrilled gasps of recognition as Albee peers ever deeper into the life of the female species, leading to an utterly breathtaking finale.

Glenda Jackson holds court in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women at the Golden Theatre (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

Three Tall Women was inspired by Albee’s troubled relationship with his adoptive mother. “We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years, but I was past all that, though I think she was not,” Albee wrote in the introduction to the published 1994 edition of the play. “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. . . . No, it was not a revenge piece I was after, and I was not interested in ‘coming to terms’ with my feelings toward her.” It is precisely for those reasons that Three Tall Women works so well. There are no heroes or villains, no black-and-white depictions of good and evil. A, B, and C all have their own strengths and weaknesses; despite the specificity of their lives, they are everywoman, experiencing the ups and downs of everyday existence, since death is the great equalizer. Few male playwrights have drafted such female characters as Albee, who also displayed that vast skill in such other works as The Lady from Dubuque; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Pulitzer Prize winners A Delicate Balance and Seascape.

Alison Pill, Glenda Jackson, and Laurie Metcalf star in Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

The eighty-one-year-old Jackson (Strange Interlude, A Touch of Class), in a tight hairstyle that is a character unto itself, is feisty and glamorous in her first Broadway role since she was nominated for a Tony in Macbeth in 1988, having left acting to pursue a career in politics, serving as an MP from 1992 to 2015; her A is a bigoted wealthy widow, mother, and former grande dame who is refusing to come to terms with the maladies that befall the elderly, no matter how rich they might be. The sixty-two-year-old Metcalf (A Doll’s House Part 2, The Other Place) gives a homey charm to the sarcastic spinster B. And the thirty-two-year-old Pill (Blackbird, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) holds her own as the practical C, who has dreams of a great future for herself despite seeing what lies ahead. (Among the other trios to have played the three women are Myra Carter, Marian Seldes, and Jordan Baker at the Vineyard in 1994 and Maggie Smith, Frances de la Tour, and Anastasia Hille in the West End that same year.) Two-time Tony winner Mantello (The Humans, Love! Valour! Compassion!) lets the three actresses strut their stuff with minimal intrusion on Miriam Buether’s opulent bedroom set, which is centered by the stately bed itself, here representing birth, sex, and, ultimately, death.

THE CHILDREN

Old friends Rose (Francesca Annis) and Hazel (Deborah Findlay) reunite in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (photo © Joan Marcus 2017)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 4, $60-$149
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
thechildrenbroadway.com

Amid all the splashy musicals, wacky comedies, and star-driven vehicles currently on Broadway, the British import The Children stands apart, a breath of fresh air in this winter season. Well, maybe that’s not the best way to classify this fiercely taut drama, which takes place shortly after a devastating nuclear accident on the East Coast of Britain. The fictional event appears to have even rattled the stage at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, which is severely tilted, creating a bit of an uphill or downhill climb when the characters move to the right or left. The play opens as Rose (Francesca Annis) pays a surprise afternoon visit to her old friend and colleague, Hazel (Deborah Findlay), who is living with her husband, Robin (Ron Cook), in a small cottage just outside the contaminated exclusion zone. “We heard you’d died!” Hazel announces; it’s been thirty-eight years since the two women, both nuclear engineers, last saw each other. While Hazel has settled into the domestic life of a retiree, with four children and four grandchildren, Rose has been gallivanting around the world, never settling down or getting married. When Rose asks Hazel why they haven’t moved farther away from the radiation, Hazel responds, “It’s just that little bit extra but it makes a world of difference to our peace of mind. . . . I would’ve felt like a traitor. Besides, retired people are like nuclear power stations. We like to live by the sea.” They are soon joined by Robin, who goes to their old farm every day, tending to the cows, even though it’s in the exclusion area. Where Hazel is very direct and to the point, Robin is more rambunctious and freewheeling, cracking jokes, asking Rose for a squeeze, and offering her some of his homemade wine. But when Rose reveals the reason she has returned — and secrets emerge — the trio has to reexamine their purpose in life and their future.

Robin (Ron Cook), Hazel (Deborah Findlay), and Rose (Francesca Annis) remember the good old days in U.S. premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway house (photo © Joan Marcus 2017)

Originally produced at the Royal Court Theatre, The Children is brilliantly written by Olivier Award winner Lucy Kirkwood (Chimerica, Mosquitoes), who has created three complex characters who are genuine and unpredictable. The play takes a hard look at ageing and death, examining the responsibility the old have to the young. “How can anybody consciously moving towards death, I mean by their own design, possibly be happy? People of our age have to resist — you have to resist, Rose,” Hazel says. “If you’re not going to grow: don’t live.” It is also about blood, both literally and figuratively. When Rose first enters the house, a shocked Hazel turns defensively and hits Rose, giving her a bloody nose. One of Hazel and Robin’s children suffers from mental illness, thinking she is a bloodsucking vampire. And, of course, radiation poisons the blood. James Macdonald, who has directed numerous works by Caryl Churchill (Escaped Alone, Top Girls) and Sarah Kane (4.48 Psychosis, Blasted), among others, keeps things balanced even as the actors have to deal with Miriam Buether’s angled set, which is framed as if a tilted picture on a wall come to life. Olivier nominee Annis (Cranford, Troilus and Cressida), Olivier winner Findlay (Stanley, Coriolanus), and Olivier nominee Cook (Juno and the Paycock, Faith Healer) reprise their roles from the London production, all three delivering warm, heartfelt performances, with a special nod to Cook for having to ride a tricycle uphill despite a bad back. And Max Pappenheim’s sound design stands out as well, from a Geiger counter to church bells. Despite its title, The Children is the most adult show in New York City right now, a marvelously resonant, intelligent, and engaging play that continually defies expectations as the plot twists and turns while something threatening hangs just past the horizon.

LOVE AND INFORMATION

Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between MacDougal St. & Sixth Ave.
Extended through April 6, $65-$85
www.nytw.org

The theater community has learned to expect the unexpected from British playwright Caryl Churchill, whose cutting-edge works have been showing up without warning in the in-boxes of artistic directors and company producers for decades. The seventy-five-year-old writer of such award-winning plays as Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Serious Money redefines live storytelling yet again with her latest, Love and Information, just extended through April 6 at the Minetta Lane. The New York Theatre Workshop production is a series of snapshots relating the state of the world today, examined through the gathering, processing, and utilization of information among married couples, lovers, family members, professional colleagues, and best friends. The 110-minute intermissionless play consists of seven thematic sections, each one made up of funny, poignant, abstract, surreal, visceral, and potently recognizable vignettes that last between five seconds and five minutes; although the script gives them such mostly one-word titles as “Lab,” “Message,” “Secret,” “Torture,” “Irrational,” “Dream,” and “Recluse,” they are not identified onstage or in the program notes. The short dialogues take place in a white cube with a grid of some twenty-five thousand squares on five sides (calling to mind a human brain), opening only to the audience. In between each of the fifty-seven bits, in which fifteen actors portray one hundred different characters, the stage goes completely dark, bordered by a row of very bright lights around the edge, as the performers change costumes at lightning speed and the sets, which usually include a single element, from a chair or a bed to a table or a couch, are magically switched. It’s a kind of short attention span theater that evokes a more serious, though still playful, Laugh-In and Robot Chicken as the skits just keep on coming, seamlessly directed by longtime Churchill cohort James Macdonald, separated by the pitch-black accompanied by sounds, from familiar tunes to random found noises, that further one of the central themes, memory.

The tone is set from the very first vignette, in which a man is begging a woman to tell her a secret she is hiding from him. “Please please tell me,” he implores. “I’ll never tell, no matter what,” she responds, but eventually she whispers it in his ear so the audience can’t hear it. “Now what?” he repeats several times, a question that not only leads to the rest of the play but gets right to the point of what people do with information — first they want it, then they’re not always sure what to do with it. Later, a woman gets technical with her partner, saying, “What sex evolved to do is get information from two sets of genes so you get offspring that’s not identical to you. . . . So sex essentially is information.” He replies, “You don’t think that while we’re doing it, do you?” to which she says, “It doesn’t hurt to know it. Information and love.” Churchill and the immensely talented cast, which includes standout performances by Karen Kandel, John Procaccino, Kellie Overbey, Phillip James Brannon, Zoë Winters, and Randy Danson, take on science, religion, emotions, fanaticism, censorship, mathematics, pain, technology, and human relationships of all sorts in clever ways, constantly surprising the audience with each new piece, although the show is probably too long by about twenty minutes, but that’s only a minor quibble. In one of the longer sketches, a man and a woman are on a picnic date, and she describes in graphic detail how her job involves cutting the head off a chicken and slicing its brain for study, a worthy metaphor for what Churchill is doing on multiple levels with Love and Information.