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Three Tall Women at Golden Theatre, New York, review - Glenda Jackson makes every moment count

Commanding: Glenda Jackson stars in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women on Broadway - Brigitte Lacombe
Commanding: Glenda Jackson stars in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women on Broadway - Brigitte Lacombe

Glenda Jackson’s long-awaited return to Broadway is glorious. From the moment she appears onstage in Three Tall Women, the 81-year-old Oscar-winning actress is a commanding presence, and the dominant force in director Joe Mantello’s stirring revival of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a woman facing the end of her life. 

Her character is a formerly grande dame billed only as “A.” Despite her fading memory (is she 91 or 92?) and a failing body, A is an authoritarian figure in a lavender nightgown to the women in her employ, who are all she has left: a caregiver and a lawyer handling her finances, dubbed “B” and “C,” respectively, and played by recent Oscar nominee Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill. While B attempts to keep the elderly woman on an even keel, C constantly questions the validity of her complaints and memories.

When A becomes incapacitated at the end of the first act, the piece resumes with the three actresses now playing the same woman at different ages. A’s son, meanwhile — a non speaking role played by an unnamed actor and a character that serves as a surrogate for Albee, who had a notoriously difficult relationship with his parents — watches over his mother. 

As the women grapple with who they were and who they will become, Albee skillfully illustrates how life gradually turned A into the cold, hard woman she is in her final days. At 26, she’s optimistic, having enjoyed the company of lovers but not yet married. After conversing with her older selves, however, she fears her happiest days are behind her. By the time she’s 52, she’s well into her marriage and well off financially, but bitterly disappointed. As an aging widow, she’s still combative as she looks back on her life, sometimes dripping with condescension for her younger selves. 

Three Tall Women was performed in London in 1994 with Maggie Smith, who would have been around 60 at the time. Jackson, whose last Broadway appearance was as Lady Macbeth 30 years ago, returned to the stage in 2016 in King Lear at the Old Vic, after more than two decades as an MP. But you’d never guess she ever left. She makes Albee’s words sing in a performance that runs the emotional gamut. One minute she is a naughty child gleefully breaking a glass for her aide to clean up, the next she’s terrified because she can’t sit down without assistance. It’s a whirlwind performance, yet one thet’s carefully fleshed out. Metcalf is also superb. Her sharp comic timing is the ideal counterpoint to A’s domineering personality in the first act, and later she reveals great depths of pain and regret as her middle-aged incarnation.

There’s little catharsis for A as she nears the end, only the memories, or lack thereof, of a life that could have been better lived. Jackson, however, is clearly making every moment count.

Until June 24. Tickets: threetallwomenbroadway.com