MOMMY DEAREST\Playwright Albee lays to rest painful memories of his adoptive\parent.

Byline: Janet Weeks Daily News Staff Writer

Edward Albee picked at a muffin served at his poolside table in the rooftop cafe of a posh Sunset Strip hotel, pleasantly shifting the conversation from the sunny weather to the "horror" of his adoptive mother.

"Did I love her?" he asked rhetorically about the disagreeable woman he has resurrected in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Three Tall Women," which opens tonight at the Mark Taper Forum.

"I suppose I did. When you know someone that long, you sort of do."

He pours a packet of Equal into his coffee. "I would be nice to her, see her, take her out to lunch. But ultimately we didn't like each other very much."

If plays like "I Remember Mama" are valentines to mothers, Albee's "Three Tall Women" is a poison-pen letter. And by writing it, Albee said, he successfully rid himself of the old crone's ghost.

As if to prove that the monkey has left his back, he discusses her life and death, trials and traumas as evenly as others discuss baseball scores.

"Since I wrote the play I haven't thought about her at all," he said without a trace of regret. "So obviously I exorcised a problem."

In the play, an old woman, fashioned after wealthy socialite Frances Cotter Albee, lives a bitter, lonely existence, surrounded only by hired workers.

To these women - a middle-age caretaker and a young representative of the family's attorney - the angry old bat tells stories of her life. Some are funny. Some are shocking. Through the tales, she reveals bigotry, paranoia and anger.

Albee, 67, says he wrote the play to tell the tale of his adoptive mother, who, like others born at the turn of the century, married for money and lived a loveless life.

Unable to have children of her own, she adopted Albee as a baby. After a bitter argument when Albee was a teen-ager, she threw him out of the house. A longstanding estrangement ensued.

"Some people tell me that in the play I'm too nice to her," Albee said of his mother. "She struck me as being a horror in the play. But maybe I came to understand why she was a horror a little better."

Indeed, the second half lets the old woman off the hook by showing how her dreams of a happy existence were crunched by the realities of life within a blue-blood, WASP-y family.

In a "Christmas Carol"-type twist, the three women on stage become three versions of the old woman. The youngest, played by Christina Rouner, becomes the woman at 26. The middle-age woman, played by Michael Learned (TV's Mrs. Walton) becomes her at 52. Marian Seldes plays the woman at 92.

By showing the parts that came to make the whole, Albee allows for sympathy. At the play's end, the audience feels no contempt for the woman, just sadness for a life so utterly wasted.

Of course, Albee is quite accustomed to telling tales about vicious people stuck in broken relationships. His 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (later made into a popular Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film) followed a husband and wife as they shattered their marriage during an all-night bender.

In "A Delicate Balance," for which he won his first Pulitzer in 1966 (his second was for "Seascape" in 1975; "Three Tall Women" is his third), Albee explored the fine line between sanity and madness through a couple forced to re-evaluate their relationship.

"Three Tall Women" differs from his previous works in that much of it is true. His mother was a bigot and, toward the end, paranoid and angry. She also was a victim of circumstances, being born at a time when women did not have the right to vote or own property.

But not every detail in "Three Tall Women" is taken from his mother's life. Some of it is made up.

"The only way I could write this play without being bogged down in my own reaction to it was to 'invent' this character," Albee said. "I pretended to myself that the character I invented had a separ'ate existence from its source."

The play ends on a pessimistic note, with the old woman declaring that the happiest moment of her life is the moment she dies. Albee admits the attitude is downbeat  but contends that it is valid.

"That's the way her life went. She decided the whole thing wasn't worth it."

He also points out the optimism in the work - a speech in which Learned's character implores the younger woman to live life fully and with passion.

Albee says he believes this is an important message to instill in the young.

"We should all be aware, as early as we can possibly absorb the information, that we only have a certain amount of time to live," he said. "What could be worse than coming to the end of your life, when you can't do anything about it, and realizing you haven't lived?"

The message is one Albee learned at a young age and still adheres to, one reason that despite having won three Pulitzers (he calls those prizes "silly") he shows no sign of slowing down at an age when other men are contemplating retirement.

He continues to teach at the University of Houston, where he keeps a residence (he has other homes in New York and Florida), continues to direct many of his plays and to write new ones.

His latest is "The Play About the Baby," of which he has completed the first act. He has three other plays sketched out in his mind but not yet committed to paper.

One project he won't be undertaking is a search for his natural parents, or any siblings. At the time of his adoption, it was legally impossible to look up such information. But despite the change in the laws, he says he won't be researching his family tree any time soon.

"I used to care about that until I figured out who I was," he said, his hazel-green eyes peering out from behind large glasses. "I used to care a lot about where I came from. I obviously don't care now."

Nor is he interested in developing a spiritual side, despite "Three Tall Women's" preoccupation with 'death.

"I have no idea what happens after death and I don't even want to speculate," he said, sitting in the bright Los Angeles sun. "I just hope the weather is good."

THE FACTS

The show: Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," starring Marian Seldes, Michael Learned and Christina Rouner.

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: Tonight through Feb. 24. Performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays, matinees at 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

Tickets: $28 to $35.50.

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PHOTO

Photo (1--Cover--Color) THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PAIN Edward Albee comes to terms with mother's cruelty in his new play, 'Three Tall Women' (2) Albee says he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Women" to convey the horror of his adoptive mother. Tina Gerson/Daily News (3) Michael Learned, left, Marian Seldes and Christina Rouner star in Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," the tale of a WASP-y blue blood whose life turned lousy after she married for money. David Sprague/Daily News