It's hard to go wrong. Give us the words of Molly Ivins and the talents of Kathleen Turner, and for 70 minutes there is bliss in this holiday season. Berkeley Rep is presenting Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, a one-woman show that sketches a biographical framework for the late political columnist's trenchant writings. Those writings provide for most of what is said from the stage, and Turner brings her own authenticity to Ivins' take-no-prisoners prose.
Turner has performed Red Hot Patriot in several other cities over the past few years and clearly relishes in carrying on Ivins' legacy. For those who may know the name but not the work, Red Hot Patriot is a good introduction to the journalist who combined rage and humor in her columns. And for those who did follow her writings, the biographical details woven in by playwrights Margaret and Allison Engel may lend added resonance to Ivins' words.
The Engels frame their play around a column that Ivins is struggling to write about her authoritative, arch-conservative father. That provides an entryway for biographical details as Ivins procrastinates from writing by talking to the audience while projections of vintage photos help illustrate her stories. Reared in Texas in a family of social prominence, Ivins was a six-foot-tall debutante at a ball that made her look like, in her mother's words, "a St. Bernard among greyhounds." While her mother considered being ditzy a social achievement, her father, in her words, "had a level of bile that could be triggered by a Shirley Temple."
After jobs at several newspapers, Ivins found her voice at the Texas Observer. "It was my gateway drug," she said of the monthly political newsmagazine, and while it led to a job with The New York Times, her incautious, provocatively liberal voice was not as well-appreciated. "Editors are mice training to be rats," she says. Ivins returned to Texas, where her writings about state and national politics brought both fans and enemies as her columns were syndicated to hundreds of papers around the country. At one point, she dismisses her own writings as "mainly backtalk of things I wish I had said to my father."
Both Ivins' writings and public persona showed brash confidence, and Turner is at ease in this guise. But Turner also captures the sorrows and insecurities that Ivins hesitantly acknowledges, and while Ivins' never-ending battle with alcoholism gets short shrift, it does provide a good line: "Alcohol may lead nowhere, but it sure is the scenic route."
Death is an inevitable presence, including a mysterious wire-copy machine that spits out obituaries; an upstage collection of forsaken desks and chairs; and even Ivins' love of the morgue, the old term for a newspaper's library of clippings that was something like an ink-stained Google search engine. Ivins talks frankly about the recurring breast cancer that took her life in 2007, and seems most angry with herself for allowing herself to be repeatedly cut, poisoned, and burned in the name of modern medicine.
Director David Esbjornson, whose Bay Area connections go back to the very first presentation of Angels in America, has staged the production with efficiency and minimal ornamentation. It's all about Ivins, and with Turner there to carry on the salute, that is a bounty. Molly Ivins had a pulpit from which she preached what she practiced.
Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins will run through Jan. 4 at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $29-$89. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.