Holland Taylor Plays Ann Richards One Last Time

The actress Holland Taylor had long been a fan of Ann Richards, the Democratic firebrand and former governor of Texas, and so she was “strangely overcome,” as she put it, when Richards died in 2006.

“I was in mourning for months and months,” Taylor said. “I wanted to do something creative about her to use these feelings, and it just came to me in a flood that I was going to write a play about her and I was going to perform it. It was aberrant behavior for me: I am a supremely practical person, but I launched into this at 65 or [6]8 or something, absolutely blind to any of the pitfalls, any of the dangers, any of the impossibilities.”

After a few years of extensive research, Taylor first performed her solo play, “Ann” (its title at the time was “Money, Marbles and Chalk”), in 2010 at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas. Several productions followed, including one on Broadway that earned her a Tony nomination in 2013.

“She’s not a Texan, but I think she captured the part of Texas that I am proud of — that kind of iconoclastic, funny, laconic storytelling,” said Julie White, who was raised in the Lone Star State and recorded the lines delivered by Richards’s assistant Nancy that we hear in the show.

Holland slipped into Richards’s drawl and her tailored white suit for the last time during a monthlong run of the one-woman show at the Pasadena Playhouse that concluded this past Sunday. (A version of the play recorded at ZACH Theater in Austin, Texas, can be streamed on PBS and BroadwayHD.)

Two days after her final performance as Richards, Taylor, 79, in a video conversation from her Los Angeles home, spoke about dark jokes, the stress of closing performances and the meaning of politics. These are edited excerpts from video and email conversations.

Did you ever consider including other people in “Ann”?

No, because it is not a play that takes place in time — I never thought of it as being about events. I imagined the circumstances and the dialogue, but the play is very true. In the back of my mind, this is a visitation. This is what the theater allows: The theater allows you to do any [expletive] thing you want.

Up to a point, since you were writing in character, based on a real person.

Well, 95 percent of this play — the words, the language, the sayings — are totally my invention. So many lines emerge from the pudding of stuff in one’s brain from research. I know a joke that she told on the morning of 9/11 that was so dark. I said to the person who told me that, “Wow, that’s almost gothic.” And that person said, “Nothing was off-limits for her.” So I wrote a joke that was equally shocking. I know what she would say in given circumstances and my own ability to write funny stuff was in some way absolutely elevated. What I wrote for her is funnier than anything I could ever write for myself.

Did you ever think about using more of her own words?

What would be the point of that? It wasn’t like she was Abraham Lincoln. She was a very accessible speaker — even her greatest speeches are very conversational, and they’re tied to her kind of homespun, hardscrabble roots. There’s probably 10 sentences that I sliver in, like, for instance, “Why should your life be just about you?” How simple is that?

How did you approach the Pasadena run?

One of the reasons I did it was, I’ve always worn so many hats and had to work so hard during every production. With Broadway, the work I had to do was not onstage: There’s no one who can do press for the show but me. I’m the only actor, and also the creator behind the whole production in every way. And so on Broadway I barely had time to think, and I was executing the play at the highest level I could. Because I was not doing many other chores this time around, I thought, At last I will deal with this text as an actress. I really explored how she gets from this flagstone to the next flagstone to the lily pond to the bridge to the puddle to the stone — jumping from thing to thing. Because to have written a play is not to have prepared to perform it at all. Very different tasks.

Has “Ann” changed the way you think about politics?

This show is really not about politics at all.

But at the end, for example, she talks about government and public service, which is — or should be — a key aspect of politics.

I think it’s about participation. When you say “politics” in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it. She had a practical sense of how things worked; she wanted people to be involved in their lives, where they had agency. You’re giving a [expletive] about what happens around you and to other people. So it’s all about participation: “If you don’t participate, you’re jus’ lettin’ other people make some big ol’ decisions for you.” That was political in that sense. Absolutely.

What was it like to perform in front of masked audiences?

It’s daunting at first but believe me, while I’m performing I have a lot of things on my mind. And I had been living for months in surgical wrapping: I was terrified of getting Covid, not for my own health but that I would shut down the production. So I had a lot of generalized anxiety and from the minute I agreed to do this, I lived behind a mask. Each day would go by and I’d say, “One more down.” We made it through and my relief was just immeasurable from not having that show close.

How did the last performance go?

I found the last day very stressful. Final performances have so much riding on them. I myself would never go to see an actor’s last performance, the same way I try to avoid going to opening nights, because I feel the actors’ anxiety. Openings and closings are so stressful, they’re just hard. But I think it went very, very well. People said so. I felt complete.

So this was really the last rodeo for “Ann”?

I could have a pang, I suppose, and maybe I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever say, “Gee, I wish I could do it again.” I am turning 80 this winter and what I do in this show is unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done onstage. I don’t have that kind of confidence in my constitution any longer to say, “I’ll do another one of that.” Learning the text takes me two hours every day with someone on FaceTime, six days a week, for two months. To do this again means I have to carve five months out of my life, and there is no five months like that I can carve out of my life. A wonderful producer-director asked me on Instagram how I feel, and I said “satisfied.” I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve.