Review: Glenda Jackson Gets Her Queen Lear Moment in ‘Three Tall Women’

NEW YORK — Her jaw thrust forward like a prow, her elfin eyes belying her regal bearing, her widescreen mouth wrapping itself around those slashing, implacable consonants — they’re all exactly as you remember them and want them to be. Or if you’ve never experienced them, welcome to the pleasure. Either way, Glenda Jackson is back; even better, she’s back in a role that’s big enough to need her.

Aptly, the name of the role is A.

A is the oldest of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which opened on Thursday night in a torrentially exciting production that also stars Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill. It not only puts an exclamation point on Jackson’s long-shelved acting career but also serves as a fitting memorial, which is to say a hilarious and horrifying one, to Albee, who died in 2016.

Though “Three Tall Women” won him his third Pulitzer Prize, in 1994, and marked his return from the critical wilderness after two decades of disrepute, this is the play’s Broadway premiere. Joe Mantello’s chic, devastating staging at the Golden Theater was worth the wait. The wait for Jackson seemed less likely to be rewarded. A highbrow star of classy film and television in the 1970s, with two best actress Oscars and a handful of Emmys, she pulled the plug on her acting career in 1992 when elected to the House of Commons on the Labour ticket. That doesn’t mean she stopped performing, exactly, as her fiery speeches often proved.

But by the time she retired from politics, in 2015, few expected the 79-year-old to show up onstage again. Then came an exhilarating “King Lear” at the Old Vic in 2016, announcing that Jackson had lost none of her power and verve.

So how do you top “King Lear”?

In a way, “Three Tall Women” — a comedy about decrepitude or a tragedy about survival, depending on how you look at it — is “Queen Lear” in a funhouse mirror.

A is a rich old lady, 92 but vainly pretending to be 91: a fossil of the old guard with all the imperiousness, mischief and grit that suggests. She spends most of her time abusing the memory of a bad marriage and an even worse son — worse because gay. Still, you are never sure how much of what she says is true; her grievances, like her racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, seem almost rote.

For A, hanging on to a sense of identity means maintaining the enamel shell of her narcissism even as she forgets what she once found so fascinating inside it. Jackson, in a lilac dressing gown and a marcelled silver wig, digs deep into that contradiction, producing huge laughs from the grim idea that awfulness is a damn good habit as death hovers.

The audience for her awfulness, in the first act anyway, consists of Metcalf as B, her 50-ish seen-it-all caretaker, and Pill as C, an uptight 20-something emissary from her lawyer’s office, trying to bring order to a chaos of unpaid bills. Metcalf, spiky and floppy, is particularly mordant in this material, sometimes bullying and sometimes coddling A in an effort to get through another unpleasant day with minimal fuss. Confined to her employer’s grand bedroom, she is a visual joke, stomping around in gray pants and sneakers.

Pill, in the least developed role, nevertheless suggests a youthful vanity as powerful as A’s. In her own hard shell of a navy pinstripe suit, she is tart, verging on pitiless; you feel her need to distance herself from the prospect of becoming exactly the same kind of woman.

And then, in the second act, here performed continuously with the first, her nightmare comes true.

Having slyly acclimatized the audience to a naturalistic comedy about the frailty of memory, Albee gleefully reshuffles the cards. After a boffo stage trick straight out of vaudeville, he lands you in a newly arranged world, in which A, B and C are no longer different women but the same one, refracted, at different ages.

In the new configuration, with the whole cast dressed in coordinated purples — the superb costumes are by Ann Roth — the tone darkens even as the play remains raucously funny. You may never have heard a dirty story about a man’s anatomy told as Jackson does in the second act, but A, B and C, now a living time-lapse photograph, have more at stake in one another’s success, and more at risk in failure.

Perhaps that’s because they are all, in essence, Albee’s mother, who (he always said) bought him from an adoption agency for $133.30 and forever after hoped to return him. “Three Tall Women” is based, in part, on conversations she had with him about her life, marriage and unhappy parenthood. In more ways than one, Albee hovers about the action. But unlike in much of his early work, he does not insist on dominating it. “Three Tall Women” is rigorous but also generous, even loving, to its characters — and audience. It honors the women’s flintiness and fear as C swears not to become B and B hopes not to become A. In doing so, it slips Beckettian existentialism through the commercial barricades by disguising it as comfortable mainstream entertainment.

Well, not always comfortable. By the end, when Jackson gives voice to A’s terror as her faculties wane, and considers the idea that death will be a relief, you may be struck, as I was most recently in the Signature Theater’s revival of “At Home at the Zoo,” by Albee’s willingness to go anywhere. Or rather, his unwillingness not to.

That doesn’t mean this is a perfect play. Given the cubist structure, it’s not surprising that the themes eventually start to recycle with more panache than novelty. And C, as written, does not always stand for compelling.

Still, time has been good to “Three Tall Women,” and Mantello’s production further burnishes its insights and confirms its originality. The staging tricks enhance the ones that Albee built in, with Miriam Buether’s astonishing set design, at first so pretty and cozy, holding unexpected dimensions of alienation in store. The lighting (by Paul Gallo) and subtle sound design (by Fitz Patton) beautifully support the idea of a play slipping identities in the same way its characters do.

Finally, though, it comes back to the actors. Jackson’s history with us, and her aura of indomitability, mean that she is not merely a casting coup for A but a natural advocate for the play’s central themes. She is, politically and personally, the embodiment of not going gentle into that good night; death and Thatcherism are all the same to her.

And though Metcalf and Pill look nothing like Jackson, or each other, they bring more important skills and associations to their roles. Metcalf, once known for tragedy but now transformed into a peerless comedian (thanks to “Roseanne,” “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Lady Bird”), is thus a very Albee creature. And it is not irrelevant, seeing Pill’s just-holding-it-together C, to think of the devastated young woman she played, under Mantello’s direction, in the off-Broadway premiere of “Blackbird.”

Watching these three women in “Three Tall Women” means seeing the ghosts and echoes of many other women as well. They complete Albee’s imaginative leap into difficult souls, which of course means all of us. And they honor a play that despite its frailties and wrinkles has aged beautifully, into a burning, raving classic.

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Production Notes:

'Three Tall Women'

Through June 24 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, threetallwomenbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

By Edward Albee; directed by Joe Mantello; sets by Miriam Buether; costumes by Ann Roth; lighting by Paul Gallo; sound by Fitz Patton; hair and makeup by Campbell Young Associates; production stage manager, William Joseph Barnes; production manager, Aurora Productions. Presented by Scott Rudin, Barry Diller, Eli Bush, John Gore Organization, James L. Nederlander, Candy Spelling, Len Blavatnik, Universal Theatrical Group, Rosalind Productions, Inc., Eric Falkenstein, Peter May, Jay Alix and Una Jackman, Patty Baker, Diana DiMenna, David Mirvish, Wendy Federman and Heni Koenigsberg, Benjamin Lowy and Adrian Salpeter, Jason Blum, Jamie deRoy, Gabrielle Palitz, Ted Snowdon, Richard Winkler and executive producers, Joey Parnes, Sue Wagner and John Johnson.

Cast: Glenda Jackson (A), Laurie Metcalf (B) and Alison Pill (C).