Edward Albee was not too keen on his mother.
The playwright takes her to task in his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical play “Three Tall Women,” on stage at The Rogue Theatre.
“The play was deeply personal to him,” says Director Christopher Johnson.
“It’s almost a blow-by-blow account of his mother’s life and his relationship with her.”
“Three Tall Women” opens with a 90ish woman who is dying. She can be demanding and thoroughly unpleasant. With her are two other women, one from a law firm, the other her caretaker. The older woman occupies the others with her stories and memories. She’s not inclined to let them talk.
In the second act, the three women represent a different age in the older woman’s life and a fuller story of who she is emerges.
Silently stalking the play is a young man, the woman’s son.
Albee was adopted and his parents were stern and loudly disapproving of the fact that he was gay. He left home when he was 18. “I had to get out of that stultifying, suffocating environment,” he said in a 1994 New York Times interview.
While writing about his relationship with his mother may have been cathartic for the playwright, who died in 2016, he packed this play with much more than a gotcha aimed at her.
“One of the big questions (in the play) for me is where does happiness begin and end,” he says. “Can you say you achieved it if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would?”
It is also about forgiveness.
“I find it to be a sobering reminder that the people who need our forgiveness most are the least able to give it themselves.”
The cast includes Patty Gallagher, Holly Griffith, Cynthia Meier and Ryan Parker Knox.
Previews of “Three Tall Women” are 7:30 p.m. March 8 and 9; opening is 7:30 p.m. March 10. Regular performances are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through March 25. There are additional 2 p.m. matinees on March 17 and 24. Performances are at The Rogue Theatre, 300 E. University Blvd. in the Historic Y. Previews are $28; regular performances $38. Student rate 15 minutes before curtain: $15. theroguetheatre.org or 520-551-2053.
