Sally Edmundson on Ann, the person and the play

By David Conrads

“Poor George, he can’t help it,” Ann Richards famously quipped at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, speaking of then-President George H.W. Bush. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” 

Ann Richards was a well known figure in Texas at the time. She had served as a county commissioner, then was elected state treasurer, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in 50 years. She was only the second woman in 160 years to give a keynote address to the Democratic National Convention. That speech -- blunt, irreverent and infused with vernacular Southern oratory in the grand tradition -- transformed her into a national figure. 

As governor of Texas, to which she was elected in 1990, she made good on a campaign promise to increase the role of minorities and women in state government, part of her plan for a “new Texas.” During her one term as governor  and during her years out of office, she was one of the nation’s most admired champions of feminism. “If you give us a chance, we can perform,” she told the national audience in 1988. “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backward and in high heels.” 

Ann Richards died from esophageal cancer in 2006. Holland Taylor, the noted actor and playwright, was one of thousands who mourned her passing. Driving to the set of the popular television show Two and a Half Men, in which she had a major role, Taylor had an epiphany. 

“I felt a calling,” she told Forbes magazine in 2018. “It was like being on the road to Damascus. I had been wanting to do something creative about her with my mournful feelings and realizing what a loss it was to the country that we lost that voice.”

Taylor knew she had to write a one-person play, a no-holds-barred portrait of the late governor. Over the next several years, she made a deep dive into Richards’ life, talked to her friends, associates and children, and researched her papers and speeches, in an effort to find, not just  Richards’ history, but her persona. “I wanted to share who she was,” Taylor said. 

The result was Ann, which opened at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas, in 2010, followed by successful runs in Chicago, Washington, DC and on Broadway. Both the play and Taylor were nominated for Tony awards. 

TheatreSquared brought Ann to audiences in Northwest Arkansas in February 2020, with Sally Edmundson playing Ann Richards. A life-long resident of Houston, Edmundson remembers well the years when Ann Richards was a major player in Texas politics -- before and after her four years as governor -- and an outspoken advocate for women’s causes. 

We sat down with Sally during one of her well-earned days off to talk about Ann, the person and the play. 

T2: Tell us a little about your background in theater. Have you always wanted to be an actor? 

SE: I did not venture into the acting profession until I was 25 and about to get married. My first, and very lucrative degree, was in romance languages, which I got at the University of Texas in Austin. I was working as a paralegal, doing lawyer’s work but getting paid less than the secretaries. I decided to be a lawyer, never asking myself if I would actually like it. I got into law school and was getting married at the same time, and every time I thought about going to law school, my stomach hurt. My husband, who went to law school and practiced law for about a nanosecond before going into commercial real estate development, said, ‘Why don’t you take some time off and figure out what you want to do?’ I said, ‘I know what I want to do. I want to be an actor.’ He looked at me like he had no idea who I was. I said it was a suppressed desire. I was born with this voice and people have said to me since I was 12 that I should be in radio or television or something. I always went to girls schools and girls camps, and always played the male lead. I was in a singing group at UT and just thought, ‘What the hay!

“Then Philip and I got married, and I went down to the Alley Theatre, which is a big regional house in Houston, and I took a professional acting class in comedy. It made me realize that there’s a lot more to this than just wanting to perform. There’s a craft and I need training. I ended up getting a BFA in theater, because the small, liberal arts college I went to in Houston did not have an MFA program at the time. I called Philip and told him what I was doing and he said, ‘You have to make me a promise.’ And I said ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘If it turns out you're any good, you have to promise you’re not going to leave me and run off to LA or New York.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to leave you. You’re coming with me!’ So here we are.

“I’ve been doing this madness for over 40 years now. I’ve been very fortunate to have been connected with what was originally a fledgling, rebel, guerrilla theater called Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston. We’re now in our 42nd season. We started in 1978 and my first show was in 1980. I was not there from the very beginning, but I’ve been there the longest. I’ve been through every regime. I’m the institutional memory.”

T2: Looking back over your career, are there any roles or productions that are especially memorable for you? 

“Ann is the second one-woman show I have done. I was also in Full Gallop, the play about Diana Vreeland. She was another force of nature, but in a different field and in a different way. She was the iconic editor of Vogue magazine in the 1960s. She really changed the way fashion magazines were regarded. They used to be just catalogues for the debutante and the social season on the east coast. She opened it up into the world of art. That’s a fabulous piece and a fabulous character. I did Full Gallop first in 1999 when I was probably about 15 years too young. I got to reprise it in 2014. It’s a one-woman show, but there’s an interesting relationship with the French assistant off stage. And it’s live. It’s a very wonderful relationship and my daughter, who was 24 at the time and speaks beautiful French, played that part. I would get verklempt every night when she came out and joined me at the curtain call. 

“Another production that was special to me was Elizabeth Rex, by Timothy Findley, the late Canadian playwright. I played Elizabeth l in that. I played it in Houston and I believe it was the American premier. 

“In some ways I was born in the wrong century and in the wrong country. I’m really a classical actor, but I’ve never done Tennessee Williams. I’ve never gotten to do Chekov. I have done Shakespear. I was in the Scottish play [Macbeth] and got to play Lady M[acbeth]. I was Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. I’ve done a lot of contemporary work, which is Stages’s mission, bringing in edgier contemporary pieces. If we do a classic, we put our stamp on it.”

T2: You were in a production Ann at Stages Repertory Theatre in 2018. Ann Richards had been dead for over ten years by then, but she was such an iconic figure in Texas. Did you feel any particular pressure playing her in Houston, needing to really get it just right? 

SE: “No, because I’m not impersonating Ann. Just technically, I have a lot more musical notes in my voice. I’m taller. We have different body types. I’m not as curvy as Ann was. I have hazel eyes. She had big, azure-blue eyes. I don’t think I’m as hard as Ann. I’m tough, the toughest on myself, so we share that. We’re both perfectionists. We often feel that nobody is working quite as hard as we are. 

“I knew I was doing Ann a year before I had been cast. Of course, I’m doing loads of research. To do justice to any character, real or imaginary, you’ve got to like them. You’ve got to find what makes them tick, what makes them think they’re doing the right thing. Six months before rehearsals I talked to my director, who is a very dear friend, and told him that I was having a hard time liking Ann. I had been reading a lot of stuff about the hardness of her. In the seminal biography, at least up to this point, by Jan Reid, he quotes someone saying that she could really be hardest on people she loved the most. That really stuck with me. I realized that the hardest person on Ann was Ann. Someone once said of Ann that she is a general, a mother, an angel and a leader. You see all of that in the play. That made it easy for me to really like her.” 

T2: You performed Full Gallop twice and now Ann for the second time. Is it especially difficult performing a one-woman play? 

SE: “The first time, in 2014, I lost 15 pounds just in rehearsal. I was so terrified! I had never done this. Ann and Full Gallop are really good plays, but I really miss the energy of working with other people. It’s not just not having a safety net. It’s exhausting! Ann is particularly exhausting. Full Gallop was not as exhausting, physically. It’s always a vocal marathon, but Ann is so exhausting because she goes 90 miles an hour and doing six things at once, all the time. I’m a little older than she was when she left the governor’s office. The office segment is a killer. Once you get it, it is a blast.”

T2: Do you prepare differently for a one-person show than you do performing with an ensemble? 

SE: “Some would say I am anal about my preparation. I’m very particular and I like to have had the words in my mouth every day. Mondays are my days off and do not touch Ann, and that’s really good. Tuesday through Sunday, I run those lines. I read my script. I can’t get too far away from it. I do that with a multi-character play -- run my lines all the time. The comment we usually get, no matter what we’re doing, is ‘I can’t believe you can remember all those lines.’ That is the least of it! My retort is, “Yea, and you have to make it sound like something you’d say.’ I’ve got 45 pages of stuff I’ve got to make sound like something I’d say. The fun part is once it’s memorized, because that’s when you play with it. That’s when the real acting occurs.”