| Seattleplays.com review By Tom Scanlon |
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| Three Tall Women Seattle Public Theater Bathhouse Theater 7312 W Green Lake Dr N Closes June 12 |
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| Have you noticed that Edward Albee is a bore? Virginia Woolf was terrific, but beyond that . . . Three Tall Women, like so many of his plays (all right, The Zoo Story was pretty good, very enjoyably menacing), is over-written, repetitious and self-congratulatory, lolling around like Narcissus in a bubble-bath with a ceiling mirror and – worst of all – tape recorder. The Seattle Public Theater staging of this Pulitzer Prize winner for Best Drama in 1994 is straight-forward, by-the-book. Which is not a good thing. Albee doesn’t give his characters much to do, here; director Shana Bestock has them stand, sit, stand again, cross, stare off into the audience . . .The cast is pretty talented, particularly Betty Campbell and Erin Day. And the idea of a woman at three stages in her life simultaneously is quite interesting. But the speeches are repetitive, and most of the things seem to be happening in past tense, that dreary expository state. So much telling, so little doing . .. The three stages of this woman don’t seem to like each other very much at all – hostility, accusations, denials, etc. But it’s a happy ending. How nice. |
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