Now Showing At Arizona Theatre Company, 'Three Tall Women' Is A Brilliant Play Brilliantly Performed. By Margaret Regan EDWARD ALBEE DOESN'T bother to give the three tall women of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play real names. That's because the women, known only as A, B and C, are drawn as archetypes standing in for the three ages of woman (or man): youth, midlife and old age. The old woman, A, is at the heart of this challenging play, which takes place entirely in her elegant bedroom. Brilliantly played by Lucille Patton in Arizona Theatre Company's production of the 1991 work, A is a brittle 92-year-old who fades in and out of alertness. She's angry, mostly at her body's betrayal of her, though she often vents her rage on the people around her. Her once-tall figure has shrunk, her bladder has a mind of its own, a broken arm refuses to heal, and, worst of all, her memory fails her time and again, most often when she's right in the middle of regaling her reluctant listeners with her favorite stories. "What was I talking about?" she demands, furiously and confusedly. B is the middle-aged companion who's been paid to look after the difficult old woman. Played with kindly matter-of-factness by Laurie Kennedy, B is a no-nonsense woman who's seen enough of life to know when to let the old woman rant, when to prod her along in her stories, when to dispatch her posthaste to the bathroom. Fiona Davis is C, the young woman horrified by the disintegration she sees in A. The lawyer who's been dispatched to the old woman's opulent home to persuade her the time has come to turn her business affairs over to others, C is full of youthful arrogance. She believes simple reason will rein in the old lady's excesses. She tries, unsuccessfully, to correct A's stories ("You're 92, not 91," she insists more than once), and she explodes when the old woman casually indulges in outmoded prejudices, speaking of a "smart little Jew" or "uppity coloreds." C doesn't have the sense to know when it's useless to fight. "Let it go," the middle-aged B reproaches her more than once. Much wiser, B knows fighting with the cantankerous A is like fighting death itself: There's no winning that battle. The whole first half of this two-act play is a tug-of-war among these three characters, a struggle that's sometimes as tedious, and as painful, as listening to one's aged loved ones recounting the same stories again and again. Yet the way Albee writes of the random stirrings of memory among the aged is near-perfect, as is his depiction of the heartbreaking deterioration of the body and the loss, through mental collapse, of one's own life before death. It's an uncomfortable work to sit through, because it touches so closely on the lives of its audience. And it reminds us, as B is at pains to point out to C, that the long sweep of a person's life heads inevitably toward the final breath. But Albee is also a clever dramatist, and he deftly shifts the play in the second half from the universal to the particular. By making use of a theatrical twist that would be unfair to give away (it's a twist that left the ATC audience gasping), the playwright switches the drama from a dissection of the universal ages of woman, to the particular life circumstances of the character called A. Albee writes in a program note that A is loosely based on his own adoptive mother, a combative, paranoid woman who died in her 90s before he wrote the play. Three Tall Women becomes a personal investigation into the hows and whys of the person his mother became. Here the writing is nothing short of masterful, though we travel Albee ground already made familiar in such plays as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cynicism about marriage and fidelity, disappointment in children, alcoholism, greed, ambition and revenge have all have made their mark in the composition of A's life, a life that we nevertheless come to understand if not admire. Albee shows himself especially acute to the particular condition of women of his mother's generation and class, women forced to make their way in an unforgiving world through grit and good looks.q Three Tall Women is a brave work that took some courage for ATC to stage. A collaboration with the Dallas Theater Center, where it played before opening in Tucson, the production has the advantage of being directed by Lawrence Sacharow, a frequent Albee director who directed this work's American premiere. Three Tall Women, a production of the Arizona Theatre Company, continues through Saturday, November 9, at the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. Ticket prices range from $18 to $27. For reservations call 622-2823. For information only call 884-4877.

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