WMC News & Features

A New Audience for an Unforgettable Writer

Kathleen Turner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At one point in Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre through January 11, a photo of an old newsroom flashes on the wall, and screen icon Kathleen Turner, as the political journalist Ivins, asks the audience what’s wrong with the picture. “They’re all men!” people call out.

Moments like this help Turner not to mind so much being on stage by herself.

“It can be scary, and it can be lonely,” Turner said. “It’s kind of nice at the end of a show to go out for a drink with your cast mates. No such thing with this. On the other hand, it involves the audience so much that I don’t ever feel alone because I’m really talking to people.”

Ivins, a syndicated columnist and humorist who called covering the Texas legislature “reporter heaven,” was the author of six books. The title of her first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, came from billboards The Dallas Times Herald put all over the city to support her after she said about a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” and some advertisers boycotted the paper. Ivins delighted in skewering the powerful, and satire was the weapon she used against them. “There are two kinds of humor,” she said, “one kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity—like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that's what I do.”

Ivins called herself an “inadvertent expert” on George W. Bush, having gone to high school with him. She wrote two books about his presidency, Bushwhacked and Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.

Turner—known for her work in films such as Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, John Waters’ Serial Mom, and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, as well as on stage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Graduate—originated the role of Ivins at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. in 2012. She says she wanted to do this solo show because she respected and loved Ivins for her humor and way with words, as well as her politics and fearlessness. Turner, who has been on the board of People for the American Way and Planned Parenthood for decades, crossed paths with Ivins over the years. Turner says she started volunteering with Planned Parenthood after she used their services in college, and once she became famous at 25, after Body Heat, she lent that fame to benefit the organization.

“When I’m working in a town, I’ll create an event for an affiliate. Do some fundraising, do some attention grabbing,” she said. “One in five women in this country have used Planned Parenthood. It is an essential service in our country.”

After Ivins died in 2007, twin sisters Margaret and Allison Engel, both journalists, decided to write a play about her. They were thinking of something along the lines of what actor Hal Holbrook did with Mark Twain—giving a dramatic recitation of the author’s words—but people in theater told them the play needed more structure. Turner said she had a hand in creating that structure.

“We had wonderful stuff about Molly and Molly’s writing, and we found the way to dramatize it,” she said. “The outline of it is Molly’s had a terrible and angry relationship with her father, who is about as far right wing as possible. She says, ‘I hate his world, he hates mine,’ and that was true most of her life. When the play starts, she’s trying to write a column to him and for him.”

A friend of the Engels who sits on the board of People for the American Way sent Turner the script. She says she got caught up in the idea of portraying Ivins.

“She was a woman of such great charisma and humor,” Turner said. “I was attracted reading her writing. She would say at the end of a column, ‘Now beloveds,’ and I would think, ‘I believe her, I think she feels that,’ and I try and make it true in the play.”

Having Turner in the role was their absolute first choice, says Allison Engel.

“Molly was brassy and opinionated and tall and passionate about civil liberties and civil rights,” she said. “Kathleen’s been active in politics for decades. She really believes the words, and it makes a huge difference. You watch her transform herself into Molly right before your eyes.”

Engel says she and her sister admired Ivins for her journalism, and that she, like both of them, worked in big cities as well as small communities—Allison for the Des Moines Tribune and San Jose Mercury News, and Margaret for the Washington Post as well as the Lorain Journal.

Allison says she and her sister both experienced the bias in journalism toward New York and Washington, and that Ivins’ ability to be so influential writing from Texas impressed them.

Ivins enjoyed a good fight, but she used humor so effectively that she didn’t create enemies, Allison said. And her writing about politics is relevant today, she added.

“It was amazing to us how prescient Molly was,” she said. “A lot of the lines seem like she’s commenting on the recent midterm elections.”

Turner agrees that Ivins still speaks very directly to people.

“Last time we did this [play] was in DC right before the 2012 elections,” she said. “We could not put enough seats in the house. People are so hungry and so hopeful and still have such a belief in America.”


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