The Cast
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Geoff Button (Young Man) is glad to be back working at Apple Tree. He previously appeared in the mainstage production of Indian Ink, the Theatre for Young Audiences productions of The Outsiders and And Then They Came For Me, and also directed this season's remount of And Then They Came For Me. He is a company member with the Hypocrites and has appeared in a number of their shows, including Machinal, Balm in Gilead, and Equus, for which he won the Jeff Citation for Actor in a Principal Role. He also directed last year's production of True West for the Hypocrites. Most recently he was seen in the title role of Lifeline Theatre's Johnny Tremain. Thanks to Laura for everything.
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Jenny McKnight (C) is delighted to appear for the first time at Apple Tree Theatre. Most recently, she performed in Pride and Prejudice at Northlight Theatre and Painting Churches at Indiana Repertory Theatre, where she also played Jane in Pride and Prejudice and the Governess in The Turn of the Screw. Jenny was in the premiere production of Mitch Albom's comedy Duck Hunter Shoots Angel at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan, and later reprised her role at the City Theatre in Detroit. She has appeared in Liliom at Kansas City Repertory and All My Sons at Milwaukee Repertory. In Chicago, Jenny's credits include Ariadne's Thread at Victory Gardens Theatre, The Laramie Project and The Incident at Next Theatre, and Childe Byron, Another Part of the Forest, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale and Watch on the Rhine with Eclipse Theatre, where she has been a company member. Many thanks to Brian and all the wonderful folks at Apple Tree.
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Barbara Robertson (B) last worked at Apple Tree under the direction of Brian Russell, and opposite Ann Whitney in My Old Lady. Other credits include Grand Hotel (Drury Lane Water Tower) and Shozo Sato's Kabuki Lady Macbeth (After Dark Award: Ensemble) at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, which is where she also played Desiree in A Little Night Music directed by Gary Griffin, and Hermione in The Winter's Tale. Performances at Goodman: The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (directed by Robert Falls); House Garden (After Dark Award), Black Snow ( Jefferson Award), Pal Joey (Jefferson Award); She Always Said, Pablo; and Carol Burnett and Carrie Hamilton's Hollywood Arms (directed by Harold Prince); at Court Theatre under Charles Newell's direction, Barbara was seen as Martha (Joseph Jefferson Award) in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Hamlet, Mary Stuart (Jefferson Award Nomination), La Bete (After Dark Award)/Little Foxes; Piano/Twelfth Night; Cherry Orchard/An Ideal Husband; Tartuffe/Philadelphia Story; House of Blue Leaves. Besides the National Tour of Angels in American I & II (Jefferson Award), and Wisdom Bridge 's production of Kabuki Medea (Helen Hayes Award, Jefferson Award) which played at the Kennedy Center, some Chicago credits include; Mercury Theatre: The Last Night of Ballyhoo; Lookingglass: Hard Times; Victory Gardens: Emma's Child (Sarah Siddons Award); Center Theater: Detachments (After Dark Award); Marriott's Lincolnshire Theatre: Chicago (Jefferson Award); and work at Steppenwolf, Royal George, Peninsula Players. Film credits: Robert Altman's The Company; David Lynch's The Straight Story. Television: A Will of Their Own (NBC); A Mother's Courage (Disney); The Untouchables (Paramount); and Early Edition (CBS). Barbara, a proud member of Actor's Equity, also works with The Art Institute of Chicago as an artistic associate, and teaches at Columbia College Chicago .
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Ann Whitney (A) last appeared on the Apple Tree stage with Barbara Robertson in My Old Lady directed by Brian Russell. It is such a pleasure to be reunited with them and to have Jenny McKnight and Geoff Button join them in this intriguing play. Most recently, Ms. Whitney appeared in Claudia Allen's play Hanging Fire at Victory Gardens and at Wagon Wheel Theatre in Indiana, in A Little Night Music and On Golden Pond. You may also have seen her onstage at Court Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Northlight Theatre, Steppenwolf and American Theater Company. She has 5 Jeff nominations and received a Chicago Leading Lady award from the Sarah Siddons Society for her work in Driving Miss Daisy. She is happy to be a member of Actor's Equity Association. She recently recorded 4 episodes of The Twilight Zone for radio broadcast and can currently be seen as the “Crochet Lady” in a commercial for Glade air freshener. Special thanks to Bill Whitney and Bob Harris.
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cast | press | photos | background | tickets
Press
Pioneer Press feature
Copley News Service review
Chicago Sun Times review
Chicago Tribune review
Time Out Chicago review
Pioneer Press review
Daily Herald review
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Highlights from the Pioneer Press feature by Catey Sullivan There's wedded bliss with your eternal love -- and then there's real life.
Or, as Woman B, 52, derisively asks Woman B, 26, in Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women":
"Well, what are you expecting? Monogamy or something?"
Albee's blistering observations on the human condition in the play, which begins previews Wednesday at the Apple Tree Theatre, won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The characters don't need names. They are Everywoman, at various key stages of her life.
Woman C is single, a callow idealist, smug and sure that good-hearted girls always find true love and lead rich, satisfying lives.
Woman B, married for more than 20 years, knows better.
Woman A, having lived through the better part of a century, knows far better.
Life, as Albee shows in "Three Tall Women," is what happens when you're making other plans.
For Ann Whitney, playing the 90-something Woman A has been an all-consuming experience.
"I've told my husband I can't care about him for a few months. Or, I'd care about him but I wasn't going to have time to act like it until this is over. I've found that I can't leave the play behind when we don't have rehearsals. I have to be with it every single day. It's that intense," she said.
As he did in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," Albee puts a uniquely brutal (and often perversely, incredibly funny) spotlight on issues of marriage, love, and expectations versus reality in "Three Tall Women."
Both A and B share a certain degree of harsh wisdom -- they know that life is a matter of adjusting your expectations. Of calming down and settling in. Of surviving in situations nobody warns you about for because if they did, "the streets'd be littered with adolescent corpses!" as A says.
Woman A, noted director Brian Russell, is not a particularly warm and fuzzy individual.
"She's difficult. Very difficult," he said. "We might not initially like her, but we're sympathetic to her plight. I think we start to love her, maybe because of everything she's gone through, or because we recognize so much of ourselves in her.
"When we're young, we have this certainty about how our lives are going to be," he said. "By our 40s, most of us I think, find we're not where we thought we were headed. The dreams we had turned into quite another thing. That thing might be great, but it's not what we'd imagined."
Double that divergence between dreams and reality, and you have the view from the 90s.
"Albee makes you think about your own life, and we mustn't be afraid to look at the stuff he presents," Whitney added. "For all cynicism, the bitterness that you can find in this, there's also something else; this is a play that asks you to learn to forgive yourself for your regrets, both for the things you did and the things you didn't do."
"These women are bearing witness to a life," Russell added. "We plan a future that looks like X and we wind up with Z. Accepting that leads to catharsis, and understanding. And, yes, forgiveness."
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Highlights from the Copley News Service review by Dan Zeff The show gets a rating of four stars.
"Three Tall Women" is the play that restored Edward Albee's reputation in the early 1990s after 20 years of commercial and artistic failure. The play won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for drama (it premiered in Vienna in 1991) and re-established Albee as one of the significant playwrights in American drama.
"Three Tall Women" is a great play and all its merits shine through in the eloquent and luminous revival at the Apple Tree Theatre.
Albee's drama has strong autobiographical roots in his turbulent relationship with his mother (Albee was adopted as an infant). Albee finally walked away from his family at the age of 20 but his fearsome mother figures large in many of his most acclaimed plays. But the audience needn't be aware of any autobiographical elements to enjoy the emotional sensitivity and profundity of "Three Tall Women." And if that's not enough, the show is ornamented with three awe-inspiring performances.
The play is divided into two parts. In the first part, we meet three women, called only A, B and C. The A character is an old women, either 91 or 92, in failing health and failing mind. She's an imperious, petulant grand dame who occasionally recognizes that age has made her a physical and mental ruin.
The other two characters are the old woman's middle-aged paid companion and nursemaid (B) and a young women (C) who represents the old woman's law firm trying to sort through A's messy financial affairs. There isn't much plot in the first act, which deals mostly with the old women's meandering memories of her youth, her irritability, and her occasional horrified moments of self-recognition. The act ends with the old women suffering a stroke.
In the second act, all three actresses are on stage again, but now each one plays A at various stages of her life. Throughout the act, a mannequin lies under bedcovers on a large bed, representing the comatose old woman. Meanwhile, A, B and C gather to analyze and describe the life that each of them has lived, from their distinctive generational viewpoints. The young woman, at the age of 26, is callow and naive. B, at age 52, is worldly wise and a bit cynical. A is no longer the doddering old woman of the first act. She's now shrewd and intelligent (there are indications she's dead).
This may sound obscure and a little dreary, but Albee makes many pungent comments about mortality and the expectations and disappointments of life-all with considerable humor and insight. The observations and anecdotes and bickering tie the second act together into an attention-grabber that requires no traditional storyline, though gradually we do learn much about the composite woman's life.
In an act of psychological generosity, Albee has painted his mother in sympathetic, or at least understanding, colors instead of using the play to settle old family scores. Part way in the second act, a young man, A's son who clearly stands for the playwright, makes an entrance to sit silently at his stricken mother's bedside. The son, though he never speaks, is enveloped in genuine grief as he sees his mother inert and on the point of death.
The three characters are Albee's gift to the female acting community and each role is filled to perfection at the Apple Tree. Ann Whitney delivers a towering performance as the senile A of the first act and the canny and savvy woman of the second act who comes to terms with her life and especially its end.
Barbara Robertson is brilliant as the sharp-tongued and experienced B in middle age, the perfect age to look both back and forward on a long life crowded with pain and suffering and a few joys. Jenny McKnight is superb in the difficult role of the youngest woman, exasperated and a little unfeeling as the lawyer's representative in the first act and as the confused and A's inexperienced youngest self in the second act. Geoff Button plays the silent son.
Behind the scenes the hero of this triumphant evening is director Brian Russell, who knows all the emotional eddies and shoals of this intimate drama and brings out its spiritual shadings with unobtrusive precision. The physical production is likewise outstanding, including J. Branson's opulent bedroom set, Frances Maggio's costumes, Dave Ferguson's dramatic lighting and Scott Miller's sound design.
Audiences in 1994 must have been both astounded and grateful to see a play as accomplished and powerful as "Three Tall Women" after so many years of Albee flops. We can't capture that sense of amazement today, but we can still revel in the beauties of this classic and the magnificence of its staging at the Apple Tree.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
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Highlights from the Chicago Sun Times review by Hedy Weiss
Highly Recommended
And the play? Albee's intimate, multifaceted, time-shifting portrait possesses such a piercing ring of truth, yet its biographical roots are almost beside the point. "Three Tall Women," the Pulitzer Prize-winning work now in a vividly acted and insightful revival at Apple Tree Theatre, may evoke a specific woman's long life and complex psyche. But it also is about everywoman's life -- the loss of innocence and the thrill of experience that comes in one's 20s, the mix of power and bitterness that can inform middle age, and the rage and resignation that are inevitably part of growing old and facing death.
Because she is not entirely in control, we see this woman almost as a gargoyle -- a grotesque version of who she was as a younger woman, or as the more mature woman who rejected her homosexual son. Moving about her creamy boudoir -- J. Branson's set ideally captures this woman's style and period -- she is volatile, freely bigoted in an old-fashioned way, sharp-eyed when it comes to comparing her sister and herself, condescending and crude about the wealthy "little man" she married because he made her laugh, frank about her revulsion to oral sex and joyful in her memories of her days among the horsey social set. She only briefly mentions her son, who visits rarely, and who displays little affection beyond bringing her such favorite flowers as freesia and orchids.
In the stunning second act, all three incarnations of this tall woman duke it out, with the silent presence of the son (Geoff Button) at her bedside. As the young woman, McKnight is elegant and lovely in her subtle suggestion of the dichotomy in her character as she remembers pivotal moments of her coming of age, and is horrified by the vision of the old woman she will become. Whitney is at turns robust and pitiful in her tour de force performance of the hugely challenging role of the old woman, who churns with ambivalence before coming to peace. But it is Robertson, scorching and brilliant as the pivotal "woman of experience," who holds you in thrall as she boasts of having "a 360-degree view of life" at age 50 -- both darker and freer than before, but still rich in possibility.
Director Brian Russell has not just cast the play expertly. While previous productions have homed in on a certain shrillness in the work, he has managed to capture its deeper and more luminous aspects, bringing a delicate balance of heat, light, wisdom and truth to the inevitable human rusting. cast | press | photos | background | tickets
Highlights from the Chicago Tribune review by Chris Jones
... But what Apple Tree does provide, courtesy of three of the best actresses in Chicago, is a straightforward-but-stellar, skillfully acted revival of this remarkable play under the direction of Brian Russell.
...All three of the central performances — Ann Whitney as the withering A, Barbara Robertson as cynical B and Jenny McKnight as hopeful C — represent work of the highest order.
More restrained than usual, Robertson is especially good, crafting a highly literate character who looks (depending on the moment) either like she's on the verge of solving life's eternal mysteries or committing the most brutal kind of homicide. The richest performances have multiple shades and this one has more sides even than Albee has neuroses.
And as the woman's young and idealistic self, the vulnerable, complex McKnight delivers a monologue as emotionally painful as it is sensual. It recounts a brief, youthful vista of sexual and seemingly spiritual fulfillment, which will never return. It's delivered with such wistful delicacy it makes you mourn your own happiness — as unappreciated — at the time.
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Highlights from the Time Out Chicago review by Novid Parsi
...J. Branson's desaturated set suggests both old lay's room and your deathbed, too. Under Russell's alert eye, none of these fine actors as the three tall women stands above (or below) the others. Instead, their distict voices interplay like a tight three-part harmony, breaking into solos with spotlit monologues.
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Highlights from the Pioneer Press review by Robert Loerzel
...The three actresses currently starring in [Three Tall Women] at Apple Tree Theatre bring it to life with nuanced, believable performances.
Ann Whitney plays the older woman, simply called "A" in the script. She's utterly convincing as she shifts suddenly from one emotion to another, terrified at her own helplessness, suspicious of everyone around her and trapped in memories both good and bad.
Barbara Robertson plays B, who is A's caretaker and Jenny McKnight is C, a young lawyer who's visiting A and trying to get her to take care of her financial matters.
In the second half of "Three Tall Women," the older woman lies dying in her bed. Meanwhile, three versions of the same woman walk around the room, speaking with one another.
McKnight plays her as a wide-eyed 26-year-old looking for perfect love. Robertson plays her as disillusioned 52-year-old. And Whitney plays her near the end of her life - looking pretty much the same as the feeble, addle-minded woman of Act 1, except that she's in firm control of her body and her mind as she confidently stands in the bedroom next to her own bed-ridden body.
Director Brian Russell wastes little effort with stage effects - the set by J. Branson is appropriately simple, with lighting designer Dave Ferguson creating shifts in mood and time - putting the focus where t should be on the three actresses and Albee's words.
Although McKnight, Robertson and Whitney don't share that much of a resemblance, their performances in Act 2 make it seem plausible that they could be the same person at different ages.
This outstanding production of "Three Tall Women" will leave you immersed in deep thought about your own life and the lives of the people you know.
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Highlights from the Daily Herald review by Barbara Vitello
...it's in the riveting second act chronicaling [the 92-year-old woman's] evolution and decline that we get the full measure of this woman. The excellent Robertson delivers a blazing performance as A's middle-aged counterpart, a woman free of illusions cruelly wielding her power. McKnight is luminous as a naive young woman hoping for the promised happy ending. Then there's Whitney in a striking performance as the unrepentatn, unforgiving grand dame.
Brian Russell directs this stellar cast, which also includes Geoff Buton in a nonspeaking role as A's son.
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Photos
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Background
When Edward Albee began writing his play Three Tall Women after his mother died, he did so without the desire for revenge. Though he and his mother had managed to make each other very unhappy throughout the years, he simply felt a need to write about the emotions which surrounded her.
He was already sixty-two when he started writing Three Tall Women, but he had been thinking about and personally living this play since his “first awareness of consciousness” as an infant.
I knew my subject, my adoptive mother, from my infancy until her death over sixty years later. It is true I did not like her very much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self. I harbor no ill will toward her.
Within the story, Albee reveals all of the facets of his mother: the wildness of her adolescence, what she went through during the years of her marriage and her husband's infidelity, and her strange un-motherly detachment from her son.
I realize then that what I wanted to do was write as objective a play as I could about a fictional character who resembled in every way, in every event, someone I had known very, very well. cast | press | photos | background | tickets
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