Unless you have a raging fever, an ice bath wouldn’t seem like a particularly pleasurable experience. And yet “Three Tall Women,” Edward Albee’s late-career masterpiece being revived on Broadway, could be called an ice bath of a play, from which you emerge not just stimulated but somehow uplifted — an inch or two taller, spiritually speaking.
Bleak the play certainly is, as it examines with blunt honesty and raw intimacy a woman’s life as a cascade of lost illusions, betrayals and disappointments, with the occasional glimmer of pleasure here and there. And yet, as performed by three sterling actors of three generations — Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill — Albee’s biting analysis of the dark undertow of human experience, the gradual awakening to the knowledge that life’s progress does not necessarily lead to serene contentment, has a bracing power that stiffens your spine, even as you blink away tears.
