MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The 2018 Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women is a reminder that even in this time when we are bombarded by lies, half-truths, and spin from everyone from the White House to biased news sources to Russian bots, there are no lies greater than the lies we tell ourselves in order to deny responsibility for our lives and keep on going. While Three Tall Women has some surface similarities with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with three versions of the same character, this is not a didactic play about the possibility of moral reform, but rather one that both comes too late in the day for the possibility of change—the main character dies—and also strongly suggests that the main character was incapable of taking that kind of responsibility for her own life. Like in Sartre’s No Exit, there is this sense that the hardest thing one can do is face the truth about oneself and that even after death, characters will do almost anything to avoid owning up to truths about themselves. In Three Tall Women, however, hell is not other people. Hell is self-recognition. In Albee’s script, this is embodied in the second act when 26 year old, 52 year old, and 90 year old versions of the self are in dialogue, recognizing ways in which this self has failed to live a life of radical authenticity. While patriarchal pressures clearly contributed to A’s life choices, there is nonetheless a sense that she failed to have meaningful relationships with anyone and failed to take meaningful agency over her life.