Finding a deeper meaning to stories
Edward Albee’s ‘Three Tall Women’ doesn’t feel like the same play duo put on 25 years ago in Edmonton
In 1960, Martha Henry and Diana Leblanc met as classmates at the National Theatre School, in its first-ever cohort of acting students. They have been friends and collaborators ever since, forging groundbreaking careers as actors, directors, artistic directors and educators. Each has directed the other in various theatre productions, including a now-legendary Stratford Festival production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” that was later filmed, with Leblanc directing Henry as Mary Tyrone.
Now the two have reunited for Stratford’s production of “Three Tall Woman,” with Leblanc once again directing Henry, who plays the complex, infuriating, mesmerizing matriarch known only as “A” in the play, a character based on the playwright Edward Albee’s adoptive mother.
We met on Zoom the day after the show’s press performance. The reality that the show was up and running was still landing with Leblanc: “I’m not in shock, but I’m still taking things in, that it has happened. It’s wonderful,” she said.
The production was programmed for 2020, then postponed until this year and numerous scenarios were proposed — performances outdoors, performances indoors at the Tom Patterson Theatre, nothing happening at all if another season had to be cancelled — before the decision was finally made to stage it indoors in the intimate Studio Theatre. “One of the happiest moments of the last couple of years, I guess, was the first rehearsal, to have the actors there,” Leblanc said. Working on this show with these actors — Henry, Lucy Peacock, Mamie Zwettler and Andrew Iles — has been “one of the best times” for Leblanc.
When I ask Henry what it’s like to be performing for an audience again, she said she couldn’t answer the question in a straightforward way.
“I haven’t been well,” she said. While she was performing in “Marjorie Prime” at Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto in early 2020, she found that she was limping, and by the end of the run was using two canes to walk.
“Luckily, she was a woman of my age,” Henry said. “I’m no longer playing 15-year-olds.”
She has nerve endings which are being pressed, affecting her right leg. She was prescribed vigorous physical therapy among other things, but her leg is becoming less and less usable. In “Three Tall Women,” she uses a walker, and at home her daughter is taking care of her. She says this and the overall experience of aging is helping her deliver her character.
“I really don’t have to go very far to understand A,” says Henry. “‘I can’t remember anything’ is a line that rips out of me every single time. I have problems now with my memory … I don’t think I’m quite as far gone as she is in Part I. But I’m close enough … that none of it is a reach.”
Leblanc interjected at this point. “First of all, Martha is by a long shot not near that. Lest anyone think that just having all that to work with makes it easy to play, it ain’t so. It still requires what Martha has along with her years … an incredible amount of, well, let’s just say technique.”
This is not the first time the two have worked together on “Three Tall Women.” Leblanc directed a 1996 production at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton in which Henry played A, for which they each won Sterling Awards (the Edmonton equivalent of Doras), and the production overall won the outstanding production award.
“The only thing I remember from that production is my first line,” said Henry. “After that, nothing. Not one line, not one syllable … I don’t remember understanding the play. I’m sure I didn’t. I was way too young to play A.”
Leblanc recalled the show more clearly: “The other actresses, Fiona Reid was one of them, and Jennifer Wigmore. And I remember thinking at the time, and still do, that they were really, really good,” she said.
She allowed that she didn’t really understand the play either back then.
“I thought I did. But it’s like that line that A has. ‘There’s a difference between knowing you’re going to die and knowing you’re going to die’ … at this very advanced age, to come back to a play that is so, so wise. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s so wise about loss, all those losses. And so wise about death, and letting go, and is that even possible?”
Leblanc brought up the concept of “sitting in it” — sitting in pain, sitting in one’s own situation, and Henry said, “That’s what makes it such a pleasure,” referring to the play.
“You encounter something that you think, oh yesterday, I didn’t completely understand that, and today I do,” Henry said.
“And then tomorrow, oh, I didn’t completely understand that yesterday the way I thought I did. So he is constantly throwing things at you, and we can kind of hear him chuckle as he throws us these odd balls and we try to catch them. And occasionally we do catch them, and he’s thrilled when we do. And then he sits there and smirks at all the things that we can’t catch yet. I mean he’s very present for all of us.”
In conjuring Albee, Henry drew on personal experience. She met him several times, the first time in New York when she was there with the Stratford Festival performing in two plays. “I was sitting in my hotel room and the phone rang and a voice said, ‘Hello, is this Martha Henry?’ I said yes. And the voice said ‘This is Edward Albee’, and I said something like ‘Yeah, sure. Of course it is. Who’s calling?’ ”
He came to see the show she was performing in that evening, and had a drink afterwards with her and fellow company members William Hutt and Richard Monette. While telling this story, Henry pulled something out of a notebook next to her chair and held it up to her camera: A photo of Albee from that era, looking intensely at the camera and stroking a white cat.
“Do you carry him around with you?” I asked.
“I certainly do,” Henry said. The two share other memories during our conversation: Leblanc’s being struck by Henry’s “gift” as an actor the first time she saw her perform at the National Theatre School; how Leblanc unlocked Henry’s performance in “Long Day’s Journey …” by having her sit in a rocking chair and saying to her, “just rock”; how a conversation over lunch with Henry convinced Leblanc to apply to be artistic director of Théâtre français de Toronto, a position Leblanc held from 1991-96.
Of course, talking about theatre is the occasion for our meeting, but it’s still striking to me that all these shared memories are about their working lives. This is in contrast to A, Henry’s character in “Three Tall Women,” who was wealthy and did not have a career. I ask Henry and Leblanc how much their identities have been shaped by being theatre artists.
“What a question,” Leblanc said. “Martha, you go first.”
“All I ever did in my life, when I was seven years old I joined the Brownies, not to learn how to set fires but because they did a play,” Henry said.
Leblanc originally trained to be a ballet dancer with some success, but eventually realized that she did not have the “right shape” for that art form, and auditioned for the National Theatre School. “I discovered the joy of words … I never looked back.” She described her engagement with theatre as a “driving passion, that thing you have to do or die … which is kind of neurotic when you think of it. But I think it has saved me in many ways.”
“I was quite tiny and skinny when I was a kid,” said Henry, “and I remember being bullied at one point by some older girls … while this was going on I thought to myself, ah, but I know what I’m going to be. So they can’t hurt me. And I carried that around with me for a long time.”
How has the drama of the pandemic affected them? Leblanc said she will not miss rehearsal in masks: It’s “probably one of the worst parts.”
Dealing with illness has shaped her response to this question, Henry said.
Early on during this time, “the last phrase in the world I wanted to hear, which I was hearing over and over and over again was ‘when things get back to normal.’ That was, to me, insane because I knew there was no going back to normal, that we are all going to be different in some way through this.”