SOURCE: "Edward Albee Conjures Up Three Ages of Women," in The New York Times, February 14, 1994, pp. C13, C16.

[In the following excerpt, Brantley comments on Albee's treatment of life, death, aging, identity, and personal experience in Three Tall Women.]

The woman identified simply as A in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, the startlingly personal work that is receiving its New York premiere at the Vineyard Theater, shares many of the linguistic and psychological traits common to characters in Mr. Albee's more abstract plays. She is given to questing reiteration of certain phrases that take on different shadings in the repetition; she shifts disjunctively between arrogant complacency and fearful disorientation; and her memory slides and stumbles like a neophyte skater. "I can't remember what I can't remember," she says.

But A is a woman whose speech patterns are not merely stylized representations of Mr. Albee's enduring obsessions with the...