To do a one-woman play is a challenge; to do a one-woman play about a noted public figure and keep the audience enthralled for two hours is a tour de force.  That’s what Holland Taylor manages to do in Ann, which just opened at the Pasadena Playhouse (through April 24).  In it she plays the late, great Ann Richards—not by impersonating her but by inhabiting her in all her glorious sound and fury, along with a ribald sense of humor and a Texas drawl.

Taylor also wrote the script, opening the action as a speech given to some graduating class, replete with podium.  The play then morphs into a biography of a woman who got married young and had four children, then longed for something else to anchor her as they grew up.  She entered politics late and almost by accident, but took to it like a fish to water.  And kept getting elected, despite being an unlikely candidate for Texas public office: a divorced woman, a liberal Democrat, a feminist.  Richards reached her career apex giving the rousing keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, when she was Texas State Treasurer, then getting elected Governor of that state three years later.

“I have a lot of opinions,” Taylor as Richards says early in the play, and you get a rapid-fire succession of them.  “Life isn’t fair, but government should be,” was one of her famous lines, and you get the sense she was in politics to make things better, not just to serve herself.

The first part of the play sweeps you quickly from childhood to adulthood,  then lets you savor a day in the hectic life of Governor Richards.  The set switches to a gubernatorial office with its big desk and formal trappings, and Richards paces the room, talking nonstop on the phone to a series of people and on the intercom to her assistant.  It’s multi-tasking to the max, as she juggles legislation to sign, a possible pardon, advice for Bill Clinton, and holiday plans with her four grown children.  (One of those kids, by the way, is Cecile Richards, who was for 12 years the charismatic leader of Planned Parenthood.)  So many issues that preoccupied Richards are still topical, such as race relations and gun control.

Brilliantly acted, brilliantly written, and relevant to boot.  If you see one piece of theater this year, let it be Ann.

Pasadena Playhouse
39 S El Molino Ave
Pasadena, CA 91101
For ticket info, check: https://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/