Bed Rest
Glenda Jackson as an imperious dying nonagenarian in "Three Tall Women" at the Golden Theater.
A RICH WOMAN LIVES HERE. We know that, even before the character called A (Glenda Jackson) snaps, "I'm not made of money" and her home health care worker, character B (Laurie Metcalf), replies sotto voce, "Yes, you are." Such are the truths of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," whose current revival is nominated for six Tony Awards, including best scenic design.
Sit, Staid
Laurie Metcalf making herself comfortable.
This staid bedroom with a tufted headboard and celadon lamps and chairs is not necessarily what you expect from Miriam Buether, a German-born designer who is known in London for "audacious design" (The Guardian’s description). Like the tilting stage and the hotel room for "Wild" (2016) that just disappeared mid-play and the goofy animals on the wall in the musical "Anna Nicole." Then again, all that staidness in "Three Tall Women" has a quiet audacity of its own.
Buether cleared things up in an email interview. “I think that what we're discussing here is the ‘formality’ of the set,” she said. “Partly, this is a response to the formality of Albee's text.” Which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Next to Formal
The playwright Edward Albee, who died in 2016.
Jackson’s character, a stern nonagenarian, is near the end of her life and grasping for some control. Probably, Buether suggested, she has spent “90 years thinking about what is important and what is not.”
“Sifting through what is transient and superfluous and discarding all that, you may well be left with a space that is very formal, very certain of itself but still peaceful, graceful," Buether said. "Where every detail has already been considered.” (Writing about "Three Tall Women" in The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney called the set "stiflingly tasteful." Judging by the rest of his review, that was a compliment.)
Inspiration
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's White House bedroom.
“One of the early references for the interior of A's bedroom was the Kennedy White House,” Buether recalled.
“We looked at photos of Jackie Kennedy's bedroom, decorated by Sister Parish.” Buether and Joe Mantello, the director, agreed that A would have hired an interior designer with just that kind of taste.
Type A?
Jackie Kennedy, in 1962, when she was first lady.
Marilyn Stasio's review in Variety went into detail about one piece of furniture.
"The bed itself is overpowering,” Stasio wrote, “covered in fine fabrics and crowned by a vaguely regal headboard. The rest of the furnishings — antique chairs, upholstery, blanket chest, wall covering, framed pictures (but no family photos) — contribute to the aura of claustrophobic safety." (Of course, as Stasio also notes, there's nothing even remotely safe about the play -- or A's world. Her very being is falling apart.)
The walls are a study in relentless cream-colored molding. Every celadon table lamp (Rooney saw it as mint green) has a three-ball base, matching porcelain finial and ivory bell shade. Although Albee’s original script specified shades of blue, Buether found the greens more interesting. They “felt more suitable for character A,” she said, “but that's instinctual, of course."
Trinity
From left, Alison Pill, Jackson and Metcalf in the play's second scene. It takes place in a time warp -- and on an altered set.
The set does change, as Jesse Green mentioned in his review for The New York Times, in what used to be Act II (for this production, “Three Tall Women” is a one-act). He describes the bedroom as "at first so pretty and cozy, holding unexpected dimensions of alienation in store."
A very large mirror is involved. As is the living but very still body of A, which has been represented by a mannequin in past productions. (Jackson is busy downstage, playing her aged but lively self.) Part 2 of the play has the three actresses playing the same character, A, at three stages of her life: young adulthood, middle age and dotage. In an interview with Deadline.com, Mantello discussed his thinking about using a real person in that upstage bed instead.
Minimalism
Chris Cooper and Metcalf on Buether's "A Doll House, Part 2" set.
Buether, whose Broadway work has included the essentially empty home that Nora comes back to in "A Doll's House, Part 2" and the end-of-the-world cottage in "The Children,” made her design choices after considering a variety of ideas about out-of-body experiences, she said.
“A view of yourself lying under an oxygen mask, lying on the operating table or looking down on yourself sleeping” was the general idea, she explained. “The view of your face or your own body in a mirror is a development of that idea.”
She quoted a monologue by Metcalf’s character, B:
“Standing right up here, right on top of the middle, it has to be the happiest time …. It’s the only time you get a 360-degree view."
According to Buether, all three characters are “aware of this self-seeing,” in all directions. The audience feels a quick, potent burst of it too.