Writers often fictionalize their world, taking people, places, and events and weaving them through their texts, albeit disjointed and altered rather than as parts of a greater whole. This is especially true of American playwright Edward Albee's latest Pulitzer prize-winner, "Three Tall Women", the Arizona Theatre Company's second production in their 30th anniversary lineup.

Inspired by the life and personality of Albee's cantankerous adoptive mother, "Three Tall Women" examines the meaning of life from the perspective of a woman awaiting her death. Alone in her bedroom, with only remnants of her former selves as company, she is all too aware of her fate - a destiny that has already taken so many people she has known.

For Albee, there are only two subjects worth writing about - life and death. The play explores both and suggests that there is not much difference between the two. Albee (known mostly for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "The Zoo Story") has never been one to camouflage the pain of living. He portrays life in all of its "oozing and stinking," like an abscessed wound needing to be drained. In this latest creation, he leaves death unveiled as well.

Pushing 70 himself, Albee juxtaposes a feisty and fiery and interminably prejudiced 92-year-old woman (known only as "A") with the woman she was at 52 and their naive and tender self of 26. Realism and fantasy collide as old and young taunt and banter one another at different junctures of the life cycle.

Albee vividly paints the pains of age - the shame of being incompetent and incontinent, the loss of dignity and control in life, incapable of handling one's own affairs and consequently being treated like a child - and he forces his audience to contemplate its own mortality. While the aged hold sway concerning wisdom and sense of self, youth revels in power, pride and vanity. And all the while, he constantly reminds us this is par for the course.

While Albee's text, like so many of his others, is painfully poignant, it was never intended to preach. And it is just this that the ATC manages to do. Granted, the script calls for three parallel women trapped in the bedroom of a wealthy and crass widow; it is craftily devised "thinking theater" that is limited in action. But the ATC, with its intricate yet static set, stunts the play's direction and manages something of a Sunday sermon.

The play would seem to work better in a smaller theater or with a more "confining" design, creating the emotional terror of having to defend your life in your death room crowded with an infinite number of your former selves. And not merely over the years, but also in a cyclical pattern throughout every day. Our pride shrinks at night, but our sense of self is somehow taller in the morning. Wisdom waxes while control wanes. As our years progress, our end draws ever more near.

Perhaps Albee understands this pattern better than most - critics often use it to describe his success as a playwright. He is exalted for one play and reviled for another. Passed the point of weighing critics' words, he understands that everyone's success (and life) follows an analogous path. So true as well of theater.

While the ATC's production is often distracting and fails to embody Albee's enlightening and frightening words, one can still enjoy Albee for Albee's sake. He is the prodigal child of Broadway, which often turns about and condemns him for being just that.

"That's the way it goes."

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Arizona Theatre Company's productions of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" runs through Nov. 9 at the Temple of Music and Art (330 S. Scott Avenue). Tickets may be purchased at the ATC Box Office, all Dillard's ticket outlets, or by phone at 622-2823. For more information, call 884-4877.

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