'Red Hot Patriot' explores world of Molly Ivins

SANDPOINT — Theater comes in a variety of flavors, from the big, grand musicals that demand a full stage and large auditorium, to more close-up and personal offerings that call for a smaller venue and fewer seats.

A show fitting the latter description opened this past weekend at the Panida Little Theater, which turned out to be the ideal spot for the production. The play, based on the life and times of legendary newspaper columnist Molly Ivins, is titled “Red Hot Patriot” and stars Miriam Robinson as the brassy writer from Texas.

“I love the Little Theater,” Robinson said between rehearsals for opening night. “It’s a very intimate space and it’s exactly what this play calls for.

“When you’re doing a one-woman show, you need to focus,” she continued. “You can’t have the distractions of lights, accessories or too much stage, even.”

In “Red Hot Patriot,” Robinson purposely breaks the sanctity of what actors call “the fourth wall” — the imaginary veil that separates the artistic reality of what’s happening on stage from the real world of people sitting in the audience.

According to Patricia Walker White, executive director for the Panida Theater and its newly-created production arm, the Panida Playhouse, the Little Theater lends itself to this kind of interactive theatrical experience.

“It’s a great little black box theater,” she said, using the term that describes venues of less than 100 seats.

It’s also already rigged up with the kind of layout necessary to pull off the technical aspects of the play, which include minimal lighting but maximum use of projected images on a screen located behind the actor, as well as multiple sound cues. Those audio-visual attributes are handled by stage manager Keely Gray, who sits in a booth directly above the 90-seat audience section.

Gray, a former Sandpoint High School drama student who went on to become a theater major in college, has those cues dialed in, said Ron Ragone, who is co-producing the play through his eponymous Ron Ragone Productions.

“She’s running the show now,” he joked. “We just go there.”  

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For Robinson, the task of being the only character with lines onstage — young Conrad

Mearns makes four entrances as the non-speaking “copy kid” — coupled with having to navigate a barrage of supporting images and sound effects, was made easier by Gray’s prowess in the booth.

“She trusts me to do my craft and I trust her to do everything else,” the actor said. “We’re working in synch and Keely can interact with me in real time.”

Taking on a larger-than-life role such as Ivins means taking artistic risks — the same kind of risks the writer famously took when she shook things up in her columns.

“She did it with comedy and she got people’s attention,” Robinson said, adding that Ivins’ prose earned her two Pulitzer Prize nominations and 29 weeks atop the New York Times Bestseller List for her 1992 book, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?”

“When she passed, George Bush, who was one of her biggest targets, actually wrote a touching tribute,” the actor went on. “Her work wasn’t about being a liberal or a conservative, it was about getting out there and doing something.”

“She was a journalism pioneer,” Ragone said. “She broke into the good ol’ boy network and she did it with gusto and a great deal of success.”

Ivins took a back to basics approach in her work, often encouraging readers to demand more from themselves and from the elected officials who purportedly served them. If politicians followed the same credo, she wrote, they would go from “dancing with whoever gives them the money” to “dancing with the one who brung ‘em.”

Though a humorist at her core, Ivins was also the product of personal battles with depression and the fallout from having a rigidly by-the-book military father and a straight-laced southern belle for a mother. Robinson found plenty of raw material for developing her own character, since she shared a similar upbringing, particularly with her career U.S. Marine Corps father.

“I love Molly — I relate to Molly,” she said. “This is a very cathartic play for me.”

One of the hoped-for outcomes of the play, she added, is that it will spark an emotional response from audiences, as well.

“It’s predominantly humor, but you get a little bit of everything in this play,” said Robinson, fingering the drama mask pendant she wears on a silver chain around her neck. “We just want people to walk out talking and respecting others.”

“And it’s nice to be reminded that we can respect one another,” Walker White said.

After learning of Laura Bry’s sudden death on July 5, the producers and the actor decided to dedicate opening night to her memory and in recognition of the body of work she left behind as a champion for human rights, including her leadership in the campaign to add the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the Idaho Human Rights Act.

“When we lost Laura, we lost our own version of Molly Ivins,” said Robinson.

“Red Hot Patriot” will be performed this Friday and Saturday, July 17-18, at 7:30 p.m., and on Sunday, July 19, for a 3 p.m. matinee show.

Tickets are $14, available in advance at Pedro’s, Eve’s Leaves, Eichardt’s Pub Grill & Coffeehouse and the Pend Oreille Arts Council Office next door to the Panida. Tickets may also be purchased online at: www.panida.org and at the door. There will be no intermission, but beer, wine and snacks will be sold before the play begins. “Red Hot Patriot” includes adult content and might not suitable for younger audiences.