ann, the fast-talking texas broad
by
Douglas Messerli
Benjamin
Endsley Klein (with contributions by Holland Taylor, writer) Ann / the production
I saw was a taped version of the play from 2016 at the Zach Theatre in Austin,
Texas
Were
it not for the topnotch acting of Holland Taylor—dressed in a handsome Chanel white
suit, a bowl-like wig of gray curled hair planted upon her head, with a
continual application of bright red lipstick—Ann, the one-woman
play written and directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein (augmented by stories
told to Taylor by friends of the woman she portrays, Texas Governor Ann Richards)
might have several times lost its energy as this work moves from Richards
supposedly giving a Commencement speech to graduating college students, to a
discussion of her life as a child, her marriage and its failure, her attempt to
be a perfect wife and growing alcoholism, and her first political role as a
local commissioner of Travis, Texas—all before we’re made privy to what a full
day might have been like during her tenure as Governor of Texas. Fortunately Taylor
doesn’t let the action and the play’s one-liners lose momentum for one moment,
except perhaps for the very last scene where she preaches the importance of not
perceiving government as an issue of “them” and “us,” insisting that, each in
our own ways, all should become involved with the government.
Howard and I were there through a
live-television broadcast which almost immediately made every Democrat in the
country fall in love with her.
Playing this larger-than-life figure
with uncanny preciseness—as The New York Times reviewer Charles
Isherwood put it, “If you can spy even a crack of daylight between actor and
character in this performance, you’ve got better eyes than I do.”—hardly
missing a beat between her clear adoration of her towering (6 some feet) father—who
took her on regular fishing trips as well as to the local town storefronts,
where, as one of the “good ‘ole boys,” he lovingly allowed to enter his world,
and her impossible to please mother, who after attending one of Richards’ most
famous speeches, gushed her pleasure not over her daughter’s words, but the
fact that she had been able to meet the local weatherman.
Ann was clearly blessed, so she felt, by
her marriage to the noted Civil Rights lawyer, Dave Richards, quickly
attempting to become the more-than-perfect-wife, celebrating and hosting his
many friends with large family dinners, as well as helping with his several law
cases. Her reward for all this activity, as she recounts, was a few vodka
martinis at the end of each of her long days.
By the time her friends got around to
telling her that after a few martinis she was a different woman, encouraging
her to join AA, her marriage was also beginning to fall apart. As she humorously
summarizes her experience: “I musta drunk eleven hundred thousand martinis by
the time I landed in A.A. — and by then, I was this big ol’ county
commissioner! So I like to think I broke a barrier for politicians with an
addiction in their past. And nowadays, hell, you can’t hardly even get into a
primary unless you’ve done time in rehab.”
When she, despite these issues, was
elected as Governor, we are treated to a set imitating her office in the State
Capitol where, for nearly an hour of the play, she barks orders to her off-stage
secretary and speaks on her phone to a wide range of figures, including Bill
Clinton, to whom she attempts to pitch a successful program, started in Texas,
for Federal implementation; blows up at her financial advisor who, afraid of
even visiting her office, must tell her that he has improperly vetted a
supporter who has flown her on his airplane to a Texas event—meaning she will
have pay the $8,700 some bill out of pocket (as she bemoans, that’s more than I
get paid for two months); cajoles her children to attend a planned family
dinner, assigning them each a ham, pies, and a turkey (when that youngest son
seems leery of even attending since at the last such event, his older brother
has assigned him the near-impossible, to act out Rob Lowe’s sexually orgy for a
game of charades) which ends her belting out “All right, I’ll bake the turkey!”;
insistently berating a female aide for never being in her office; and ordering
up cowboy boots for her entire staff and other friends as gifts of appreciation—all
the while signing requested autographs, planning for that evening’s speech she
is to deliver in El Paso, while a quick return so that she might meet with her lawyer
after she is determined to grant a murderer on death row a stay.
When she is defeated for a second term
by George W. Bush—primarily over the issue of whether or not Texans can carry
concealed arms (at another time, not presented in the play, Richards berated
the younger Bush as “having been born with a silver foot in his mouth.”)
Without any money to speak of, and no
obvious source of future income, she is fearful that she will end up in a trailer
in her daughter’s driveway. But suddenly, she brightens, just as I was about to
buy a bait and tackle shop, people began to invite me to lecture, and a large
group of Democratic politics ask her to join them in New York, for they had
causes while I had all the addresses.
Even with a less-than-perfect ending,
this play is a delight throughout, as Taylor
takes
her wise-talking hero on a walk through the past she so much deserves.
Richards died of cancer in 2006, but through
her still many living friends and acquaintances, her larger than life persona,
the fast-talking political diva came alive at the Vivien Beaumont Theatre in
New York and in the numerous theaters in other cities throughout the country
where Ann was performed. Even as a reviewer, I could not get tickets
when it ran at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Los
Angeles, June 25, 2020
Reprinted
from ISTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2020).