reviewvancouver: Three Tall Women

Western Gold Theatre
Three Tall Women by Edward Albee

Dates and Venue 23 October - 9 November 2014, 7:30pm Tues - Sat (2pm Sat & Sun) | PAL Studio Theatre, 581 Cardero Street

Reviewer Ed Farolan

Portraying aging without sentimentality.can only be achieved by a master playwright like Edward Albee. The frankness and down-to-earth dialogue he uses in this play is a mark of modern theatre. But what highlights his genius is how he personifies the main character in three stages of her life: youth, middle-age and old age. At first, when the scene opens in the first act, the audience is exposed to a senile woman rambling about her youth and marriage to a nurse and a paralegal. Too normal to be Albee. It's in the second act that we see the true Albee. Three women are the same woman, but in different stages of life.

Anna Hagan (the old woman), Beatrice Zellinger (the middle-aged woman) and Meaghan Chenosky (the young woman).all acted superbly. Director Terence Kelly did an excellent job in blocking and stage composition. And set designers Glenn MacDonald and R. Todd Parker did a fine job with the set.

Kudos to Western Gold Theatre for a fine production. This is their last production in 2014. I reviewed their staged reading of Moliere's The Miser last summer, and it was, as I said in my review, as though it was a dramatized production, and not a reading. Kelly and Hagan received the 2013 Jessie Award for Career Achievement.

I look forward to seeing their upcoming productions in 2015.