.hld6oddblend speaks with Emmy award winning actor HollandTaylor about playing legendary Governor Ann Richards—and what comes next.
I was eager to talk to the actor and playwright about her career, the things that ledabout how it is thatI know you studied theater in college, so I’m guessing you knew before that you wanted to be an actor. When did you know? What drew you to the theater?
So I would say my training in college was haphazard depending on the teacher, and I didn’t really consider myself a recipient of actual training for acting the way I value it until I starting studying with Stella at 37 or so. Stella was a very rigorous teacher and she had real ways to get your psyche to expand into the demands of the role, rather than having you go into your psyche for the answers.
Yes. I had so many wonderful experiences with Stella that I recall very well to this day because I wasn’t a kid when I was working with her. I had worked for 15 years, and that’s why so much that she said was really the penny dropping, because I had a field of experience into which her class entered and that made things stunningly understandable to me.
And so I went and went into her class and soon it became a kind of friendship, even though she was much older than I. I couldn’t ever quite believe in her friendship, I couldn’t imagine why she would be friends with me. But she reached out any number of times, and was very protective of me and in touch with me when I would travel for work.
I’m much more free as an actor on stage because there are not those limitations, and my performance is never the same from one night to the next. I mean it’s essentially the same, but I certainly don’t match movements and gestures from night to night. I wouldn’t want to use up that much brainpower. I’m mostly doing the things fresh within the parameters, obviously, of what it is I’m performing and my text and the general blocking.
Yes, because I was—well, I don’t even know how old I was at the time. I was probably 50 or something, but I’d been acting a long time and I had done a lot of television the previous 15 years. I think she chose me. After she died, I was simply unable to stop being mournful about the loss for the country, and for me personally. Although meeting her, which I did, was not the reason why. I just felt she was n incredibly important voice in the zeitgeist, and that she died at such a young age. She’s that the kind of personality where you think is always going to be there. You think, “What will Ann Richards say?” She was quite a presence in New York.
I spent three years doing that, with papers and recordings and videos and stuff from the archives and CNN and many different sources, because it was really total immersion: reading, viewing, talking, visiting, inquiring, and imagining. And after three years of submersion, I felt, “I have to start writing because I could go on this way for ever.” It was so fascinating. And I still research Ann.
Yes, I think that mise en scène actually works very well and allows her to go elsewhere and come back at the end. I think it does work as a speech at a graduation as well, with all the big themes and simple truths one wants from those occasions. When I had that first discovery that that’s what I had to do, I knew a lot about her, but I had only just started.
The other couple of organizing principle things were I absolutely knew I was going to be talking about the speech and say at some point, I never got to give that speech. Because I had to, in a theatrical way, reveal that this was a kind of visitation. It was intended to be a visitation from someone who is gone.
There are maybe two moments in those first 32 minutes when I could sip water. There was so much information I had to get in. and if I didn’t do it then I would not do it because it’s relentless. You can’t stop. There’s no thinking. There are literally maybe three moments in the play where the character Ann pauses and thinks about something. Otherwise, you better be talking, moving, doing something. It’s not reflective. It’s not inner. It’s outer. It is to an audience or it is terrifically acted.
I really did feel I had a direct line to her; I really did feel she was helping me, because I had to write any number of really funny lines for her, many many jokes which are not her jokes, are not anything she ever said. But I know she had a kind of black sense of humor and she saw things from a very dark point of view sometimes. She was not a Pollyanna or pie-in-the-sky. She saw things fully, darkness included and she could make a wicked gallows humor joke.
So it was very rigorous. And it was one thing to do it at the Kennedy Center because that was a month, but on Broadway, by the third month of this I was really flagging, and there was no way to build up my strength because it kept getting broken down. And I got the flu during that run and performed with it, which I never fully recovered from. It was pure ego.
One of the benefits of aging is the points of view expand. I have a gratitude for having had the experience of doing this. I was basically gifted with it.I haven’t ever seen anyone else do it! I suppose I will, I mean it’s fun that it’s being done. I’m very excited that the play is having it’s own life. It’s something that I knew would take a while, but I assumed it would happen.
Well, first of all, I don’t consider the play political at all. I think a lot theaters, going into this season of women in politics, will do the play for that reason, and it’s very useful because I think the play can inspire someone to go into public service. It’s more about public service, which Ann thought was the greatest job in the world. Ann thought there was nothing more satisfying than public service.
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