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Watch
it Bub: Charlotte Booker as The Lady With All the
Answers.
Photo: Lanny Nagler
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Confidential
to America
By
Kathryn Geurin
The
Lady With All the Answers
By
David Rambo, directed by Steve Campo
Capital
Repertory Theatre, through May 9
Eppie Lederer—better known by her pen name, Ann Landers—is
a fascinating and charismatic woman. Her story is packed with
dramatic fodder, a biographer’s dream come true. A virtuous
girl from Sioux City, Iowa wins a contest to replace the Chicago
Sun Times’ deceased advice columnist and becomes a voice of
wisdom, reason and sass for millions of readers, a last bastion
of compassion for lost souls. She warms her way onto the fridges
of everyday Americans, and into the ears of presidents and
Supreme Court justices. She uses her editorial soapbox to
demand progressive action on issues ranging from civil rights
to cancer research, tours Red China and military hospitals
in Vietnam. She maintains a decades-long rivalry with her
twin sister and professional competitor “Dear Abby.” She falls
in love with her husband while shopping for a wedding veil,
preparing to marry another man. And thirty-seven years later,
she admits an inconceivable failure to 60 million readers:
Her perfect marriage is over.
Unfortunately, David Rambo’s biographic one-woman play about
the celebrity columnist plays more like a dramatized Wikipedia
entry than an actual drama. Festooned with predictable one-liners,
and devoid of drama or sincerity, it would make for an entertaining
stop at a living museum—an Ann Landers impersonator in bouffant
and blazer giving an engaging, in-character blitz of facts
and quips—but it has no arc or heart. The current production
at Capital Repertory Theatre, brought in from TheaterWorks
in Hartford and directed by TheaterWorks founder Steve Campo,
is a fitting treatment: charming, but amounting to little
more than a chatty string of interesting information about
an interesting woman.
The
Lady With All the Answers finds Lederer in her swank Chicago
apartment in June 1975, struggling to craft the now-famous
column announcing her divorce. The script wants to be an intimate
portrait of a very public figure, illuminated in a deeply
personal moment of reflection. But it fails in its basic conceit.
Rambo sets his play in this most private and vulnerable moment,
but makes it a public event.
He has Lederer address the audience directly throughout, reading
letters, making snappy asides during significant phone calls,
and (much to this critic’s dismay) holding repeated “reader
polls,” requesting that audience members raise a hand to vote
on everything from the proper hanging of toilet paper to the
longevity of their marriage. He has manufactured an entirely
false portrait of a woman at the very instant that she achieves
an enduring pinnacle of truth.
Her elegant apartment is nicely executed by set designer Adrian
W. Jones, but not even a pen is out of place in her meticulous
sitting room/office. There is nothing to indicate the slightest
crack in her chipper public persona, even at this shattering
juncture in her life. The same holds true for Kenneth Mooney’s
costuming. In this moment, Lederer is putting her career on
the line and reflecting on the demise of a 37-years-long love.
It’s impossible to find honesty in a portrayal that depicts
her decked out in pumps and dress slacks, a purple blazer
cinched at her waist—especially as she claims she does her
best work in a bubblebath. Her strength would be more potent
if there was any hint of her unraveling.
Charlotte Booker presents a gregarious and energetic portrait
of the middle-aged spitfire. She is fun to watch, successfully
engages the audience, and garners plenty of chuckles. Her
mannerisms are well practiced, but she does little to fill
the spaces in Rambo’s script with heart. She repeatedly mimes
the savoring of chocolate from a beribboned box, but never
leaves time for it to melt on the tongue. When she deliberately
tugs a clip-on earring off each time she answers the phone,
the gesture is familiar, but the conversations that follow
feel empty. She fails to create the sense that anyone is actually
on the other line. And when, in a final burst of clarity,
she sits at her typewriter and hammers out the emotional end
of her column, piano strains swelling from the record player
upstage, there is no connection between her keystrokes and
the words she eventually reads from the page.
Lederer’s story oozes personality, humor and drama. But in
the end, the queen of quips won her readers through unfaltering
sincerity and generosity of heart. One can’t help thinking
that the lady with all the answers would be disappointed in
this superficial homage.
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