Interview: The Legendary Holland Taylor Talks West Coast Premiere of ANN

Holland Taylor is a stage and screen titan who has been mesmerizing us with unforgettable performances for decades. An eight-time Emmy Award nominee, and Emmy Award winner for her performance as Judge Roberta Kittleson on ABC's The Practice, Taylor has starred in Ryan Murphy's limited series, Hollywood, Two and a Half Men, Legally Blonde, Romancing The Stone, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Bosom Buddies, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, The Chair, The Morning Show, and much more. On stage, she starred on Broadway in 2016 in the Tony-nominated revival of The Front Page, the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Ripcord, the original productions of Simon Gray's Butley, A.R. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour, and countless other productions.

But, out of all of these incredible career achievements, what Taylor considers to be the accomplishment of her life is her play, Ann. Written by and starring Holland Taylor, Ann is an inspiring and hilarious look at the life of celebrated Texas Governor, Ann Richards. Taylor has performed Ann to sold-out audiences in Texas, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on Broadway at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater (which earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress), and she is now set to present the West Coast premiere of Ann at The Pasadena Playhouse.

Ann, directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, runs from March 22 through April 24. Tickets are available at pasadenaplayhouse.org, by phone at 626-356-7529, and at the box office at 39 South El Molino Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Holland Taylor about whether this is truly her farewell run of the show, what she has learned from playing Ann Richards, what she hopes audiences take away from the play, and more!

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The West Coast premiere of Ann has been delayed for two years because of the pandemic. How do you feel now that it is finally going to be opening at The Pasadena Playhouse after all this time?

It's a great sense of completion for me. We've played the really important theatre cities in America, I think. We haven't played San Francisco, but just touching the coast, getting out to the Pacific seemed to have a symbolic meaning for me. Even though people don't necessarily think of the Los Angeles area as a theatre giant, of course it is. I've played Chicago, I've played Washington DC, I've played New York, of course, and it just seemed right to do it. I thought I would do it much earlier than this, but other professional things intervened, and then finally we got it set for two years ago. And it was really very dismaying to have it knocked off track. But then, of course, the whole world became dismaying, and it hardly seems right to complain about that when you consider the vast, incredible upheaval of the pandemic over the globe. So, I'm glad we're back at it, and there seems to be real enthusiasm, and people are really eager to get out in the world again, with some cautions. And certainly eager to get back to the live performance arts. It's just so thrilling to see anything live! I actually get choked up almost, it's just wonderful to be in a live performance and to be at live performances.

It's quite a time to be alive, and the fact is that this play, while it is about the persona of a great and honest leader, it's about life itself in the broader sense. Right now, we're really aware of the great challenges that happen to human beings on the globe. So then, deeper meanings of this play, and the deeper meanings of what this woman stood for, have a special resonance. The last time I did it was in Austin, because I always said, when I got the play to Broadway, "I am bringing this play back to Texas." So, we did, and that was 2016. That was quite an enlivened time for the American public, and people would see the play and they would say, "You must have updated it! It's so current!" And I said, "No, it is exactly the play I performed at Lincoln Center." And I'm sure that when they see it now in Pasadena they'll say, "Gosh, the new rewrites are great!" [laughs]. No, no new rewrites. It's just that she was a very timeless person in her values, and the things that she would speak about that had depth of meaning are what we are, in fact, very much thinking about and feeling today.

I'm very moved actually, to be able to show this woman. Because in her, you see all the big ideas of what a person could be, but warts and all, she's very, very real. I show her foibles, I show her faults, I show her full range of how she related to life. And it seems to be very inspiring. I just reasoned when I was creating this play, that if I could, in a sense, make a hologram of her, that really would give the feeling of being in her presence, that audiences would be inspired by that, as they were by her. Far and away the most constant comment about her was, "She inspired me," "She changed my life," "She lifted me up," "She set me on a new path," "She instilled purpose." She is just one of those people. And it would usually be in combination with her rich humor, because her ability to connect with people was through her warmth and her humor, they were just built into her on a cellular level. So, just replicating her seems to be inspiring enough itself. And I am very much the vessel here. It literally has, certainly, by far been the accomplishment of my life.

It's so special. The play had its premiere on Broadway almost 10 years ago now, and you'd been working on it for years before that. How has your relationship with the woman, and the character, and the play itself changed over all those years?

Interesting that you should ask that! No one has ever asked me that. It has changed. Because in the first iteration of this play, it was such hard work to be the writer, and sort of a co-producer. I mean, I was buying props on eBay. And there was so much to do to get this play designed, to continue to write and polish, to learn it, to rehearse it. This is the ninth time that I've done the play. And every time I learn it, I have a methodology of noting all the verbs and tracking the lines by their verbs, because that usually drives the sentence, and then learning it half-page by half-page. The thing about learning it in that method is that you have to keep what you've already learned current. You can't just keep learning new pages and forget what you did learn, because it will sift away. So, it takes me two months, working two hours a day with someone who is watching the script while I'm trying to learn it, and telling me if I make a mistake. So, two hours, six days a week, two months. It takes me that to learn this so I can just get up and say it without a hiccup.

There is no way to even rehearse this play unless I am completely off-book. How could you possibly? It's not a dialogue. And about half of it is directly addressed to the audience, and the other half is this wonderful, 'A Day in the Life of a Governor' scene in her office, which is very lively. And so, the effort involved in getting that first production off the ground was so tremendous that I had only barely learned it, I was hanging on by my fingernails. And the first time I ever got through that two-and-three-quarter-hour play-it's not that long now!-was opening night in Galveston at the opera house there for 1000 paying people. That was the very first time I made it all the way through without getting lost. And I was joyous! I just thought, "I'mma do this this thing!"

Do you think this is truly the last time you will play Ann Richards? Is this really your farewell run of the show?

I do! First of all, I don't know where else I would do it, and it's a big deal that I have the Broadway set. It is a great expense to maintain this set, which I won't be able to keep doing, and also to truck it to another theater. And this production is a big production. It's not a one- person show that can just be driven to a theater, and they set up a rug, and a lamp, and a podium and I do it. It's nothing like that at all. It's a big Broadway production with a simply gorgeous set. And as I say, it takes me two months to get ready to go into rehearsal to do it. And so, I have to carve out four, five months out of my schedule. It requires great planning. People say, "Oh, bring it to Boston!" I can't just bring it anywhere [laughs], it doesn't work like that. I'm also way up there. I will have my 80th birthday this coming winter! And for all intents and purposes, it's not like I want it to be the last, but it is the last.

What do you hope that audiences who haven't seen the play yet and are planning to come take away from it?

I hope they take away exactly what they would if they met a great person in their life who opened their eyes to the possibilities of something they might reach for. Not politically, anything! To be an artist, to be a doctor, to be a mother. We are very influenced by great people that we meet. And this is a great person to meet. And the messages are very simple from her. She comes from the most humble of backgrounds, born in the middle of the Depression, father never got past 8th grade, she comes from an extremely modest and homespun background, and this is a very inspiring aspect of her. We are what we want to be, and reach for. We reach for our life. And she also was a natural leader.

And it's good to see that some people are just natural leaders. They take some responsibility for their community. I say that she started out as a young activist, just trying to fix things in her community. As I have her say in the play, "You know, like getting a stop sign put up at that bad intersection." That's a leader. A person who wants to do that can be president. It's the people who participate in their community in a responsible way. And everybody doesn't have to do that, people have their own callings. There are many different callings that are high for human beings, and that's just one of them. And it's good, particularly right now, to remember that leaders do come. And it's important for us to support them and know about them.

There's a voice that Ann interacts with in the office scene, her secretary who's just in the alcove in the next room, that's the indication, and Julie White is the actress from New York who did the original recordings that we still use today for that conversation. It's funny, she's so brilliant in it. She came to the final show when it closed at Lincoln Center, and she came back to the dressing room, and she was weeping. She could hardly talk, she said, "This play makes me want to be a better person." People are affected by it, I hope I can say, as if they really had an encounter with Ann herself.

What would you say is the biggest thing that have you learned from Ann Richards? From studying her, and learning about her life, and playing her?

This is a very interesting question that I have never really considered... I learned that I have something that I did not know I had, which is grit. Because the effort that I have expended over the past, well, I started in '07, so 15 years- the effort that I have expended, both intellectual, practical, the research, the travel, the meeting people, the emotional, the keeping going of the faith. Four or five years before Broadway, Lincoln Center, the willingness to step out into the void, all of that I never would have known I could have done without these tests. So, I guess I feel capable in a way that I could never feel otherwise. And I think I'm kind of adventuresome, in a way, although physically, of course, life is very different as we age, but in other ways.

I could do a lot better than I have, and I think, probably, worry is something I have not learned to put aside, which I think she could. It's very good that you asked me this question because, really, the amount of time and energy I use up in worry is just ludicrous. And so, I'm now going to turn my attention to dealing with it more like Ann. She was very positive, and she never looked back. And I do look back. So, the short answer to your question is, I haven't incorporated a number of things very well that I could have from Ann. But even a little bit of Ann can go a long way in a person's life.