FREE ANN RICHARDS!
by Kevin Nance
NOVEMBER 21, 2011 TAGS:
The only thing most people recall Ann Richards as having done as the governor of Texas is losing her re-election bid, in the Republican landslide of 1994, to George W. Bush. She’s even better remembered, of course, for her swipe at Bush’s father, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, as part of her keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. “Poor George,” she drawled, flashing a Cheshire Cat grin and a Clint Eastwood squint beneath that famous nimbus of snowy hair. “He can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
From the earliest moments of the speech, Richards (who died of esophageal cancer in 2006) tossed out steaming hunks of the political red meat she knew the Democratic Party base, its ribs showing after eight lean years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, was starving for. “I’m delighted to be here this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like,” she said, sticking a pin in her Carpetbagger Bush voodoo doll and polishing her own credentials as an Authentic Texan in a single phrase. At her core, Richards was a warrior, ready to throw down for the causes she believed in, such as women’s rights — “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,” she said that night; “She just did it backwards and in haah heels!” At times she was an unscrupulous street fighter sucker-punching those she saw as standing in her way. “I want to announce to this nation,” she crowed, “that in a little more than 100 days, the Reagan-Meese-Deaver-Nofziger-Poindexter-North-Weinberger-Watt-Gorsuch-Lavelle-Stockman-Haig-Bork-Noriega-George Bush era will be over!”
She was wrong, of course — her vision of regime change took an additional four years and the advent of her friend and fellow magnolia mouth, Bill Clinton — but the speech, in hindsight the zenith of her career, summed up the essential Ann Richards. Her humor was a weapon, marshaled for the serious purpose of ridding the country of Republican rule, as well as a running declaration of her fearlessness. At her most entertaining and effective, Richards was a political assassin, using her Texas twang, her just-us-folks populism and — the nuclear warheads of her arsenal—her scabrous jokes to belittle and behead her opponents. “We want answers, and their answer is that something is wrong with you,” she riffed on the Republicans. “Well, nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with you that you can’t fix in November!” Hers was the gift of the devastating thunderbolt whose deft comic timing kept it from boomeranging back at the one who flung it.
But there’s precious little flinging of anything in Ann, the beautifully acted but politically neutered stage play about Richards written and currently being performed (in a pre-Broadway engagement at Chicago’s Bank of America Theatre through Dec. 4) by Holland Taylor. Best known for her appearances on Two and a Half Men, the author and star is a dead ringer for Richards in a cream Chanel-style suit and a meringue mountain of what Molly Ivins called the governor’s “Republican hair.” Yet Taylor seems to have calculated that to succeed at the box office, the show must avoid offending Republicans. That means largely ignoring, if not erasing entirely, Richards’s prowess as a hurler of partisan putdowns. Although the piece begins with an evocation of her 1988 speech and later highlights her loss of the governor’s mansion she’d fought so hard to capture, the word “Bush” is never uttered, much less anything about Reagan, Ed Meese or that infamous silver foot.
It’s a curious strategy. How many devotees of the Bushes are likely to be interested in plopping down good money to see a bio-play — even one with its political claws surgically removed — whose primary goal is to paint a warm-and-fuzzy portrait of their nemesis? (The show’s poster, which promises a “No Holds Barred” look at Richards, is tantamount to false advertising.) Doesn’t Taylor know that theater audiences in general, on Broadway and elsewhere, are notoriously left-leaning? This fact seems to have reassured the creators of similar stage-and-screen portraits of the genre, such as James Whitmore’s Oscar-nominated Give ’Em Hell, Harry!, Robert Vaughn’s FDR and Laurence Luckinbill’s Lyndon. All are replete with gleefully partisan score-settling that, by the way, produced some of those shows’ most memorable lines.
By comparison, Ann feels timid and toothless, not to mention far less rollicking than it could and should have been. True, it refrains from turning its subject into a full-fledged saint; once the show gets around to putting Richards behind the governor’s desk, where she obsessively works the phones, she does a fair amount of barking, albeit mostly at members of her own staff. (“That guy couldn’t organize a circle jerk,” she cracks about one unfortunate. “I want you to rethink the bangs,” she tells another.) By and large, though, the script is focused not on what Richards did with the power she amassed, or even how she amassed it, but rather on the forces that formed her into one of the most natural politicians America ever saw.
Growing up in Waco, Texas, she inherited her humor and storytelling ability from her father, Robert Cecil Willis, and her toughness from her mother, Mildred — who, while still in the birthing bed, wrung the neck of a chicken destined for that night’s supper. Later she pulled her daughter “through the knothole” of her youth, never acknowledging (apparently to avoid giving Ann a big head) a single milestone in Richards’ dizzying political ascent, including her triumph in 1988. Ironically for one of America’s foremost feminists, the catalyst for the launch of her political career was her husband, David Richards, a civil rights lawyer who, asked to run for local office, passed the opportunity along to his wife. They divorced after a 30-year marriage — another painful episode that, like her surprising loss to George W. (despite heavily outspending him during the 1994 campaign), mostly fails to register here. It doesn’t help, probably, that Ann is framed, as we come to realize, by monologues delivered from beyond the grave; we can’t expect a ghost to get steamed up over any particular irritant or sorrow, even when its last name is Bush.
Perhaps the most exasperating thing about Ann is that, for all the shortcomings of Taylor the dramatist, Taylor the actress is terrific in the part — consistently warm and witty, brassy and biting when the script allows her to be. If only the TV star had pulled rank on the fledgling playwright, allowing more grit and guts into this otherwise bland theater experience, both of them might have a real property on their hands.
There’s still time, of course, to unleash onstage the full, unfettered woman in all her bawdy, brazen, smack-talking glory, in which state she will electrify the crowd as her real-life self did that night in 1988. Free Ann Richards!
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer who contributes frequently to Obit.
Photos by Ave Bonar
From the earliest moments of the speech, Richards (who died of esophageal cancer in 2006) tossed out steaming hunks of the political red meat she knew the Democratic Party base, its ribs showing after eight lean years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, was starving for. “I’m delighted to be here this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like,” she said, sticking a pin in her Carpetbagger Bush voodoo doll and polishing her own credentials as an Authentic Texan in a single phrase. At her core, Richards was a warrior, ready to throw down for the causes she believed in, such as women’s rights — “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,” she said that night; “She just did it backwards and in haah heels!” At times she was an unscrupulous street fighter sucker-punching those she saw as standing in her way. “I want to announce to this nation,” she crowed, “that in a little more than 100 days, the Reagan-Meese-Deaver-Nofziger-Poindexter-North-Weinberger-Watt-Gorsuch-Lavelle-Stockman-Haig-Bork-Noriega-George Bush era will be over!” She was wrong, of course — her vision of regime change took an additional four years and the advent of her friend and fellow magnolia mouth, Bill Clinton — but the speech, in hindsight the zenith of her career, summed up the essential Ann Richards. Her humor was a weapon, marshaled for the serious purpose of ridding the country of Republican rule, as well as a running declaration of her fearlessness. At her most entertaining and effective, Richards was a political assassin, using her Texas twang, her just-us-folks populism and — the nuclear warheads of her arsenal—her scabrous jokes to belittle and behead her opponents. “We want answers, and their answer is that something is wrong with you,” she riffed on the Republicans. “Well, nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with you that you can’t fix in November!” Hers was the gift of the devastating thunderbolt whose deft comic timing kept it from boomeranging back at the one who flung it.
But there’s precious little flinging of anything in Ann, the beautifully acted but politically neutered stage play about Richards written and currently being performed (in a pre-Broadway engagement at Chicago’s Bank of America Theatre through Dec. 4) by Holland Taylor. Best known for her appearances on Two and a Half Men, the author and star is a dead ringer for Richards in a cream Chanel-style suit and a meringue mountain of what Molly Ivins called the governor’s “Republican hair.” Yet Taylor seems to have calculated that to succeed at the box office, the show must avoid offending Republicans. That means largely ignoring, if not erasing entirely, Richards’s prowess as a hurler of partisan putdowns. Although the piece begins with an evocation of her 1988 speech and later highlights her loss of the governor’s mansion she’d fought so hard to capture, the word “Bush” is never uttered, much less anything about Reagan, Ed Meese or that infamous silver foot.
It’s a curious strategy. How many devotees of the Bushes are likely to be interested in plopping down good money to see a bio-play — even one with its political claws surgically removed — whose primary goal is to paint a warm-and-fuzzy portrait of their nemesis? (The show’s poster, which promises a “No Holds Barred” look at Richards, is tantamount to false advertising.) Doesn’t Taylor know that theater audiences in general, on Broadway and elsewhere, are notoriously left-leaning? This fact seems to have reassured the creators of similar stage-and-screen portraits of the genre, such as James Whitmore’s Oscar-nominated Give ’Em Hell, Harry!, Robert Vaughn’s FDR and Laurence Luckinbill’s Lyndon. All are replete with gleefully partisan score-settling that, by the way, produced some of those shows’ most memorable lines.
By comparison, Ann feels timid and toothless, not to mention far less rollicking than it could and should have been. True, it refrains from turning its subject into a full-fledged saint; once the show gets around to putting Richards behind the governor’s desk, where she obsessively works the phones, she does a fair amount of barking, albeit mostly at members of her own staff. (“That guy couldn’t organize a circle jerk,” she cracks about one unfortunate. “I want you to rethink the bangs,” she tells another.) By and large, though, the script is focused not on what Richards did with the power she amassed, or even how she amassed it, but rather on the forces that formed her into one of the most natural politicians America ever saw. Growing up in Waco, Texas, she inherited her humor and storytelling ability from her father, Robert Cecil Willis, and her toughness from her mother, Mildred — who, while still in the birthing bed, wrung the neck of a chicken destined for that night’s supper. Later she pulled her daughter “through the knothole” of her youth, never acknowledging (apparently to avoid giving Ann a big head) a single milestone in Richards’ dizzying political ascent, including her triumph in 1988. Ironically for one of America’s foremost feminists, the catalyst for the launch of her political career was her husband, David Richards, a civil rights lawyer who, asked to run for local office, passed the opportunity along to his wife. They divorced after a 30-year marriage — another painful episode that, like her surprising loss to George W. (despite heavily outspending him during the 1994 campaign), mostly fails to register here. It doesn’t help, probably, that Ann is framed, as we come to realize, by monologues delivered from beyond the grave; we can’t expect a ghost to get steamed up over any particular irritant or sorrow, even when its last name is Bush.
Perhaps the most exasperating thing about Ann is that, for all the shortcomings of Taylor the dramatist, Taylor the actress is terrific in the part — consistently warm and witty, brassy and biting when the script allows her to be. If only the TV star had pulled rank on the fledgling playwright, allowing more grit and guts into this otherwise bland theater experience, both of them might have a real property on their hands.
There’s still time, of course, to unleash onstage the full, unfettered woman in all her bawdy, brazen, smack-talking glory, in which state she will electrify the crowd as her real-life self did that night in 1988. Free Ann Richards!
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer who contributes frequently to Obit.
Photos by Ave Bonar
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