[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]
Kathleen Turner portrays a syndicated newspaper columnist in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.” Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com.
Molly Ivins spent her entire life at war.
With her father. With Republicans. With breast cancer and with herself.
She lost them all.
Along the way, however, the acid-tongued writer made readers of almost 400 newspapers that carried her syndicated material laugh.
And reflect what lay underneath the jokes.
For four decades.
Ivins, in fact, caps my personal pantheon of columnists.
Alongside Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Breslin, other wordsmith-provocateurs armed with stylized, barbed wit.
So I was pre-programmed to watch a gravel-throated Kathleen Turner shine in the Berkeley Rep’s one-woman show, “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins”
And she did.
In nearly every snippet of the 70-minute monologue that whizzes by.
It didn’t hurt that I’d twice before enjoyed her — in the title role of “Tallulah” in 2001 and as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 2007, both on San Francisco stages.
And that didn’t count films in which she truly sizzled, “Body Heat,” “Romancing the Stone” and “Peggy Sue Got Married.”
Turner captures Ivins’ outrage, as well as her battle to corral her emotions.
Ivins, a liberal Lone Star State lone wolf surrounded by a drove of politically conservative Texas sheep, had it tough from the git-go.
Her privileged mom — perhaps referencing Molly’s red hair, tallness and intelligence — labeled her “a Saint Bernard among Greyhounds.” Her right-wing father (“General Jim”) gave her no quarter, no love, but plenty of time at the dinner table to hone her skills at arguing.
But her brains and one-liners boosted her to success in a male-dominated industry.
I first considered not quoting her lines, but decided they bettered anything I could cook up. She admits loving Texas, for instance, but calls the sensation “a harmless perversion.”
While at The New York Times for six years, she declares, “I was miserable — at five times my previous salary.”
And she hopes “my legacy will be to be a pain in the ass to those in power.”
Turner proficiently captures the essence of Ivins, or at least the essence of her wisecracks. But the show, written by twin journalistically involved sisters, Margaret and Allison Engel, is skeletal at best.
Ivins’ siblings, the stuffed armored armadillo on her desk, her involvement with the ACLU and her compassion for African Americans, her cigarette smoking — all get bare-bones mentions, or none at all. Her troubles with the bottle are but fleetingly addressed (and dismissed as par for the newsroom course). Her love affairs (one man died in a motorcycle accident, another in Vietnam) also get short shrift.
And her daddy issues never get resolved (despite a struggle to write a tribute column).
The set is likewise skimpy.
It consists mainly of three castoff desks in the rear, her desk in the foreground (which allows Turner to pound on an antique typewriter), and an Associated Press machine that spits out old columns the character can cite.
Helpful is a large screen onto which black-and-white images are projected from the past: A newspaper library (“the morgue”). A rare female co-worker. A string of Texas politicos.
It’s as if I get to thumb through a fading family album.
The problem is, the photos of the real Ivins, who died in 2007, clash with Turner’s non-matching face.
The shots do depict many of the people she targeted, however, including George W. Bush, whom she knew in high school and subsequently dubbed “Shrub.”
She was not his biggest fan.
Indeed, she wrote, “Instead of 1,000 points of light, we got one dim bulb.”
Turner, who’d starred in the 2010 debut of “Red Hot Patriot,” has obviously gained poundage since her Tinseltown sexpot days. Partly due to drugs to fight years of rheumatoid arthritis, partly to the alcohol she’s consumed to quell pain.
Director David Esbjornson has done what he can to turn the monologue into a play — having her sit on the stage’s edge and its floor.
He even utilizes a silent male stooge as a copy boy, a device he might blue-pencil without loss.
But the brightest element won’t disappear: Turner’s mouth.
All in all, “Red Hot Patriot” is lightweight and fun — unless, I suppose, you’re a card-carrying member of the Tea Party.
And with Jeb Bush being touted as the leading GOP candidate for president in 2016, this lingers: “The next time I tell you someone named Bush should not be president, please pay attention.”
“Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. (off Shattuck), Berkeley, through Jan. 4. Night performances, Tuesdays and Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14.50 to $113, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.
