Holland Taylor as Ann Richards in
Ann

Ann, the one-woman show about the late Texas Governor Ann Richards, is an odd little thing: Governor Richards falls well short of the stature one would normally associate with having a major theatrical production dedicated to one’s life—if she is remembered at all, she will be remembered as a specimen belonging to a transitional species in the evolution of politics into a sub-phylum of celebrity, a missing link between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Her career was bookended by two generations of Bushes: Her famous 1988 speech at the Democratic National Convention (partly ghostwritten by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner) was celebrated for its half-clever personal attack on George H. W. Bush—“born with a silver foot in his mouth”—and her 1994 gubernatorial campaign against George W. Bush was likewise light on issues and heavy on personal opprobrium—she famously dismissed her opponent as “some jerk.” She was on the losing side in both campaigns: George H. W. Bush placed his silver foot firmly in the Democrats’ posterior with a forty-state Electoral College triumph, since unmatched, while in 1994 Governor Richards suffered an intraparty revolt when Gary Espinosa claimed more than a fifth of the Democratic primary vote and the debilitated incumbent was crushed by the future president. The most notable innovation of the Richards administration was the institution of a state-monopoly lottery in Texas—which is to say, a regressive opt-in tax on the poor and innumerate. But her most important—and most corrosive—contribution to American politics was probably a now-forgotten line in that celebrated DNC speech, accusing the FBI, DEA, and CIA of conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States, a pernicious myth that simply will not die. After her defeat, the more-Texan-than-thou Ms. Richards cashed in, became a pitchman for Doritos, and moved into a Manhattan apartment next to Kathleen Turner.

Governor Richards was nothing if not theatrical, but Ann does not identify the real drama in its subject’s career. Before the DNC speech, Ann Richards was a relatively obscure functionary—state treasurer—deeply involved in the nuts-and-bolts of Texas Democratic politics. After the speech, she was a starry-eyed up-and-comer who saw Texas as a layover on her road to Washington, possibly to the White House. Which is to say, she was the prequel to Sarah Palin, and Ann is a comedy that should have been a tragedy.

The play is strangely structured: It begins as a commencement speech at an imaginary state university somewhere in the environs of Waco, Texas, not far from where Ann Richards was raised, though a critical part of her childhood was spent in San Diego. (In this regard, her journey was the opposite of that of her chief idolator, Molly Ivins, a California-born child of privilege who transformed herself into a cartoon Texan.) The middle part of the play consists of Governor Richards at her desk in Austin, barking orders to an unseen assistant and cooing to Bill Clinton on the telephone. This is the slowest section of the play, and could have benefited from the attentions of a beady-eyed editor or three. Ann Richards talking about Ann Richards is, of course, something to behold: There is no denying the charisma and charm of the character herself, and Holland Taylor’s performance in the role crackles with the same attractive energy that Ann Richards herself brought to the role of Ann Richards. And have no doubt: It was a role, a governorship made into performance art.

Ann is many miles short of being a warts-and-all portrait of the governor, though it has some very amusing moments, some moving ones, and a few that are both. Among them is the governor’s discussion of her drinking problem, which manages to be all at once humorous, humane, and self-aggrandizing—the basic Ann Richards formula. “I was the poster child for functioning Alcoholics Everywhere. And I functioned all over the place. I must have drunk eleven hundred thousand martinis by the time I landed in AA. I like to think I broke a barrier for politicians with an addiction in their past. And nowadays, you can’t hardly even get into a primary unless you’ve done time in rehab.” A less hagiographical account might have noted that the real Ann Richards was somewhat less forthcoming on the issue of her addiction(s), especially the persistent questions about her use of illegal drugs.

Ms. Taylor, familiar to television viewers from her role in Two and a Half Men, does not really sound or look very much like Ann Richards, in spite of sporting the governor’s sparkling white coiffure, perhaps the most painstaking historical recreation since James Cameron’s Titanic. The accent comes and goes, but then so did Ann Richards’s. But there is something basically right about her portrayal, in the same way that Anthony Hopkins and Frank Langella each managed to give us a true-to-life Richard Nixon without quite achieving verisimilitude. (In contrast with James Cromwell’s George H. W. Bush, which was a thousand times more imposing and dreadful than the real thing.) There are some awkward moments, too, such as her halting delivery of purpose-built political sympathy lines designed to flatter the inclinations of the Lincoln Center audience. There is a bit of historical stumbling, too, such as her insistence that being a Democrat made it more difficult for her to be elected governor of conservative Texas; in reality, Bill Clements was the only Republican to precede Ann Richards as governor since Reconstruction, and George W. Bush, upon his election, was only the fourth Republican to hold the office in history. Some very dramatic moments were left out as well, most notable among them the spectacular self-destruction of the gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams, the clownish Republican oilman whose ill-advised joking about rape—plus ça change!—was in no small part responsible for catapulting Richards into the governor’s mansion.

Ann is that rarest of big-ticket theatrical productions—one that suffers from not being quite postmodern enough: It is a piece of political theater about a practitioner of theatrical politics that never quite gets its head around the self-consciously theatrical quality of Ann Richards’s dramatis persona, a painfully (and at times embarrassingly) reverent portrayal of a woman famous for her irreverence.

I suppose we will just have to wait for a Shakespearean succession drama based on the Texas Railroad Commission.


Tina Benko in
Jackie; image: Carol Rosegg

Athe far opposite end of the one-woman-political-show spectrum is Jackie, a trippy little treat that consists of the former first lady dragging the corpses of the men in her life around an abandoned swimming pool. It is less grotesque than it sounds.

The play about this most American of characters was written by the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, who was largely unknown outside the Germanophone world until her novel The Piano Teacher was translated into a well-regarded film in 2001; in 2004, she won the Nobel Prize for literature. The translation here is undertaken by Gitta Honegger, who called the task “impossible,” the direction is by the highly regarded Tea Alagi?, and the acting burden falls upon Tina Benko, who is game and wry, if not quite up to the challenge. Like Ms. Taylor’s portrayal of Ann Richards, Ms. Benko’s task is partly impersonation and partly dramatic performance. She is at her best when she least resembles Mrs. Kennedy, as when she directs an angry and profane tirade at the Barbie doll that serves as a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe. There is a good deal of physical comedy in the production, as well as a cute little mid-1960s Austin Powers-style dance number, and she excels at those moments.

Jackie Kennedy, both the dramatic character and the historical figure, is a Pop Art figure, one that perfectly expresses the application of the surfaces-only aesthetic of her period to public affairs: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol as a campaign platform. Ms. Jelinek’s script is at its best when it explores this aspect of Mrs. Kennedy, as in its long-but-clever disquisition on the subject of fashion and the relationship of the clothes to the clothed. Her observations regarding the complex relationship between fashion as a concealer and fashion as a revealer are far from original, but in the context of the Kennedy myth, they are both apt and interesting. But there is a great deal of competition in the field of deconstructing Kennedy cultism; watching Jackie, I could not help thinking of Collaborative Stages 2009 production of The House of Yes (see The New Criterion, November 2009), which had a number of advantages over this production: a plot, characters, and an absence of self-conscious wordplay of the sort that was thought very clever by academics circa 1988. Indeed, for all its oddball pleasures, the play seems to be intellectually stuck in the Cold War—perhaps not surprising, given the political inclinations of Ms. Jelinek, who was a devoted activist in the Austrian Communist Party right up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Not that the play touches much on the big issues of the Kennedy era—it resolutely ignores them, in fact—but it does perfectly encapsulate the intellectual and aesthetic style of the late Cold War period, when the intellectual class that had so long been enamored of the faux revolutionary spirit of Communism found itself stranded between the fully unmasked nightmare of the holocaust it had enabled and a triumphal Western liberalism that it could not quite bring itself to embrace, retreating instead into high-class word games, half-baked Continental critical theory, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, the post-post-Freudians—anything but reality.

It is for this reason that Ms. Honegger was right to describe the prospect of translating the work into satisfactory English as “impossible.” (Whether the German is satisfactory I cannot say. Perhaps our famously intellectual president might share his assessment of the prose in the “Austrian” language he wrongly believes to exist.) PoMo wordplay is a tough sell on stage in even the most capable of hands. Here we have passages such as: “I cast myself as a cast—plaster, but not plastered, and not my waist. My waist isn’t cast in plaster, and my hair isn’t plastered. It’s lacquered!” Ms. Benko does what she can with the language—her coquettish deliver of “It’s lacquered!” just barely saves the moment—but the language is in many places as dead as the corpses Jackie is burdened with.

About those corpses: Ms. Benko’s first action is to crawl up out of a swimming-pool drain dragging a string of stylized bodies made from duct tape and labeled “Jack,” “Ari,” “Bobby,” etc.—there are a number of tiny corpses attached as well, representing her lost children. Ms. Jelinek’s script is unsparing of President Kennedy’s treatment of women, including his transmission to Jackie of the chlamydia he acquired somewhere in his womanizing career, which she blames for her miscarriage. The play acknowledges the ambiguity of Mrs. Kennedy’s role in her husband’s notorious sexual career—she is partly a victim and partly an enabling coconspirator—but it fails to exploit the dramatic tension in the situation. Jackie’s Jackie is a knowing cynic, one who objects to her husband’s dalliance with Marilyn Monroe not because the star is horning in on the first lady’s marriage but because she is horning in on the first lady’s celebrity. One of the play’s funniest moments occurs when Jackie goes off on a rant in which she argues that Ms. Monroe is a minor figure, one who doesn’t matter, while a shower of those Marilyn stand-in Barbie dolls rains into the swimming pool.

If there were a Tony award for the climbing of ladders in heels, Ms. Benko would win it. Because there is no plot, Ms. Alagi?’s direction relies on a great deal of action, some of it frenetic and much of it pointless. Jackie goes up the swimming-pool ladder, she goes down the ladder; I don’t know why, but she does it with style and grace, and perhaps that is the point.

But for all of the defects of the script and the limitations of the production, there is something to Jackie. The constant flash of Ms. Benko’s ice-blue eyes is an inescapable reminder that the play is something other than An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, and the act of taking a theatrical wrecking ball to the myth of Camelot has some solid dramatic interest. Ms. Benko has some real gifts as an actress, and, unlike Governor Richards, Mrs. Kennedy is an enduring figure of fascination, a testament to the very peculiar modern fact that it is possible to have a career as a figure of some historical importance with nothing to recommend one’s self other than the habit of being extraordinarily well-dressed. I found myself thinking of Oscar Wilde’s observation: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” Jackie’s charms and its bright, hard moments of bitchy good humor are that kind of pleasure, too. But if they’re handing out Nobel Prizes for that sort of thing, Joan Rivers has been cheated.


Vincent D'Onofrio, Ethan Hawke in
Clive; image: Monique Carboni

Ms. Alagi?, a product of Yale, directed a performance of Baal in New Haven, and Baal has now been reimagined in Clive, a new play directed by Ethan Hawke, who also plays the title role. Clive is advertised as being “based on, inspired by, and stolen from Baal,” which began life as the twenty-year-old Bertolt Brecht’s Baal Eats! Baal Dances! Baal Is Transfigured! This version might well have been called Baal Fornicates!, but then audiences would need to know who and what Baal is in the context of European literature, which would get us into the Old Testament and all that, and the off-Broadway audience circa Anno Domini 2013 cannot possibly be expected to do that sort of heavy lifting. So we have Clive, in which the titular object/practitioner of idolatry is a would-be rock star down and out in New York City, directing such energy as he has into serial seductions and the important business of drinking himself into an early grave.

In contrast to Ms. Honneger’s high-minded industriousness in translating Jackie from prize-winning German into occasionally passable English, the team behind Clive began by plugging Brecht’s play into Google Translate and working from the document thereby produced. The results are not inferior. Mr. Hawke brings his easy movie-star charisma to the role, which is essential—Clive would be utterly inexplicable minus the diabolical attractiveness with which he enlivens the character. To his credit, Mr. Hawke gives every appearance of being genuinely interested in new and inventive theater, where a great many of his Hollywood colleagues seem to treat theater as an act of penance, as a place to be shriven for the sin of making money in dumb movies and to be reconciled to the idealistic artistic aims they must have harbored at some point in their careers.

What happens is this: Clive is invited to the home of a big-time music producer in the hopes of being signed to his label for a fat advance. But the only advance forthcoming is the one Clive makes on the producer’s wife, thereby derailing his musical career. There is an assortment of colored powders on offer: The blue one speeds you up, the brown one slows you down—and the white one? “It makes you stand in front of a mirror talking about yourself while planning to get more of it.” Ah, cocaine humor—a line that might have been lifted from a Robin Williams set in 1981, and very well may have been: The play exults in the bits and pieces it lifts, uncredited, from other works. Clive is a thief—of hearts, of innocence, and of Johnnie Walker Blue Label—and Clive is a thief, too.

But Mr. Hawke is a great deal of fun to watch as the downwardly mobile artist/bum, and the great Vincent D’Onofrio, with a shaved head and horseshoe mustache, is tremendous—in every sense of the word—as his foil, Doc, who sometimes plays Mephistopheles to Clive’s Faust, and sometimes Lenny to his George. Mr. D’Onofrio may earn his bread in dumb cop shows, but the cracked menace of his turn as the mad Leonard Lawrence in Full Metal Jacket is always there. Clive is not so much a character as a type—the well-worn Brechtian type—but Doc is a full-fledged person, a memorable character. In life he is a buffoon, but after his death he watches over the remainder of the play as an angel, and Mr. D’Onofrio manages to make him at once comic and august.

There is some terrific and inventive music in the play. Aside from an excursion into obviousness—a Brecht-derived play about a failed rock star simply must, I suppose, include the “Alabama Song” from Brecht and Kurt Weill’s collaboration in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, famously recorded by The Doors—the music is of real interest. It begins with a more or less conventional bit of well-harmonized Americana, and then takes a turn into the strange. Various musical instruments are built into the stage; they include a kind of hammered dulcimer built into a door frame, a plucked xylophone built into another piece of stage architecture, a sort of giant bass harp elsewhere, and a few other devices. These found-object instruments are the work of Gaines, the two-man sound-design project overseen by brothers Latham and Shelby Gaines, who also worked with Mr. Hawke to similarly satisfying effect in his production of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (see The New Criterion, April 2010). The music is somewhat reminiscent of that produced by the collaboration of Robert Wilson and Tom Waits in The Black Rider, but it is more musical and more lyrical. Mr. Hawke’s guitar playing is not very good, but then it does not have to be and probably is not intended to be. Dana Lyn, entrusted with fiddle and piano duties, is very able in the more conventional musical pieces, and the rest of the performers manage such singing and playing as is required of them with aplomb. The songs themselves are perhaps not that memorable, but the production succeeds in creating a unique sonic atmosphere that contributes greatly to the play.

There is a great deal of high Brechtian (or is it low Brechtian?) melodrama in Clive: The teenage virgin who drowns herself in the river after being seduced and discarded by the titular cad (Is there a seventeen-year-old virgin in New York City?), the descent from boho to hobo, Clive wallowing in misery as he dies alone. There are also some flashes of brilliance, as when a character demands to know: “Is this champagne stolen? I prefer the taste of stolen champagne.” Clive himself has a great sense of absurdist humor, as when he convinces a group of not-very-bright men on the make that he has a brother with a madness for bulldogs, one who is willing to pay top dollar for bulldogs brought to the bar of a particular hotel. Why? Because the prospect of a gaggle of greedy men showing up in a respectable hotel lobby, abject in their disappointment, their arms full of squirming bulldogs, strikes Clive as “beautiful.” (And it sort of would be, no?)

I am not at all sure that Brecht still has anything interesting to say to us, though I do enjoy much of the music he produced with Weill. Clive itself is an interesting counterpoint to Ann and Jackie, an exploration of the ugly appetites undergirding the culture of celebrity and extending well beyond the realm of celebrity proper. And for a bunch of angst-ridden nihilists, these German Expressionists turn out to be an awfully moralistic lot; they may wallow in degradation, but they do so for their own moral ends, obscure as those may be, and Clive, to its credit, does not elide that. Clive’s world is a manmade Hell, even if Doc is watching from Heaven. Mr. Hawke and company are very proud of the play’s Verfremdungseffekt—its estranging effect—but for all the constant reminders of the artifice of the stage, Clive is not so strange at all, only the heightened expression of familiar people in a familiar world.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 Number 8, on page 44
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