Albee Is Back

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

He never really went away -- he just turned to places like Houston and Cincinnati, where his name still conjured respect rather than condescension toward the no longer voguish -- but Edward Albee has labored without the New York limelight for nearly two decades. If there is justice, that will end this week, when his stunning Three Tall Women opens off-Broadway. Out of the simplest and most familiar material -- a woman of 90-plus years coping with the infirmities and confusions of the moment and looking back on a life of gothic excess -- Albee fashions a spellbinder. Just when he exhausts the potential of naturalistic melodrama, a brilliant gimmick, part special effect and part structural surprise, lets him move into deeper philosophical terrain.

Myra Carter caps a long career with a dazzling portrait of a dowager, whom she plays both in full command of her gilded domain and at the breaking point of senile decay. Marian Seldes, who won a 1967 Tony Award in Albee's A Delicate Balance, has never been better as a protective but peevish nurse- companion in the first act and the dowager herself in the second, which is a fantasy conversation among embodiments of the same woman at three stages of life. Jordan Baker, who plays a young lawyer and then the dowager at a callow 26, looks gorgeous but hasn't a clue what to do with either of these somewhat underwritten roles.

Albee is exorcising his own demons in having the dowager deny her homosexual son. Strikingly, he keeps the son mute and gives the mother her uninterrupted say. The counterpoint between his deathbed devotion and her strident evocation of a showdown years before could feel contrived. Like all of this chamber masterpiece, it is nuanced and heartbreaking.