"Red Hot Patriot': Kathleen Turner as Molly Ivins (2nd review)

Avaricious Wall Street bankers bringing us to the brink of a Great Depression. A President who starts a needless war and a never-ending War on Terror. Tea Parties and health reform dissenters who spew Know-Nothingisms, epithets and bricks.

Where are the Jonathan Swifts, Mark Twains or H.L. Menkens to lambaste these with ridicule and satire? Have writers, and especially journalists, lost the art of wicked humor to reveal the folly of the body politic?

A perusal of columnists, from the New York Times and Washington Post to our own Inquirer and Daily News, suggest that satire is dead, and with no fitting obituary. Outrage and ridicule live on— and perhaps only by dint of artistic license— in the refuge of political cartoons by journalists like Tony Auth and Signe Wilkinson, who keep that pre-modern legacy of satire alive.

Philadelphia Theater Company's world premiere of Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, reminds us of this gap and the great loss of a raunchy, renegade journalist, who, while setting the example, exhorted us in the face of an unjust war to "raise hell [and] think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous." The two journalist co-authors of this new play, Margaret and Allison Engel, through the impassioned portrayal of Ivins by Kathleen Turner, vividly bring to the stage the columnist's sharp political critiques and belly-laugh mockings of those in power.

Melancholy beneath the bravura

Turner especially embodies the physical, in-your-face force of Molly's personality as well as the frailties that led her to drink and a hinted-at melancholy beneath her bravura. The director, David Esbjornson, keeps Turner's Ivins spare and center stage, supported by back-wall photography projections from Maya Ciarrocchi to offer historical context.

One gets glimpses, albeit somewhat underdeveloped, of this complex person who, though born into a wealthy Texas establishment family in a state known for its mindless chauvinism (not to mention low expenditures for health and education), became a muckraking political journalist, a feminist who broke down gender barriers in the print media, and an avid civil libertarian. Where the complexities of the person might be glossed over, the play entertains fully, reveling in the writer who dubbed our last President "Shrub" and described a Patrick Buchanan speech at a Republican convention by saying "it must have sounded better in the original German."

Fired by the Times

The play also helps us understand why an iconoclastic journalist with such an appealing, colorful writing style can get hired and then fired by the staid New York Times. Unmentioned in local Philadelphia previews and reviews of the play was the fact that the Philadelphia Daily News also carried her syndicated column in the 1990s until the "People Paper" dumped her just like the establishment Times.

I only wished for more of Molly than this 80-minute play offered. Here was someone who named her dog "Shit" so she could say the word loudly whenever she called him, and spoke of red, white and blue condoms replacing the eagle as our national symbol. Can you blame me for wanting more of her rambunctious outrageousness?

Perhaps Ivins's melancholic, personal and introspective side also merited more examination. The audience clearly relished her existential "joy of a good fight" but might have welcomed deeper insights, like her observation that although "jokes keep the outrage alive— maybe it keeps it at arm's length." As a new play, first performed here, the work will likely be the subject of further editing, excising the few clunker lines.

My moment with Molly

Where mainstream journalism adheres to the ideal of a dispassionate neutralism, Ivins demonstrated the value of a partisan, compassionate journalism that this play ably presents. I discovered this firsthand when Ivins wrote in 1997 about my own Legal Services advocacy on behalf of low-income, disabled children, whose Supplemental Security Income benefits were targeted for termination by a Gingrich Congress fed by myths that children were "coached" by parents to pose as mentally deficient in order to qualify. For Molly, "making the ridiculous look ridiculous" always served a salutary purpose.

This extraordinary and engagingly funny woman of the left deserves a large— and younger— audience who may not have read or even heard of Molly Ivins. The young people who understandably get their news primarily via the satires of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Report" need to know about Molly, if only to prepare the way for the women who must follow her.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.