The program lists David Rambo as the playwright of The Lady With All the Answers, but he is really the junior partner on the script. This one-woman show about the late advice columnist Ann Landers is woven from dozens of letters from her career, and the pithy wisdom of her replies enlivens the play with her true voice.
Nancy Dussault (best known as Muriel Rush on the '80s sitcom Too Close for Comfort) disappears nicely into the role of Eppie Lederer, who took over the syndicated column in 1955.
With her hair shellacked into that trademark bouffant, she invites the audience into her elegant Chicago home on one night in 1975 when she has to write the hardest column of her life: telling the public that Ann Landers, whom Americans looked to for advice on how to save their relationships, is getting a divorce.
But this question is not really the heart of the play. It's merely the frame to contain a warmhearted tribute to Eppie, the no-nonsense Midwesterner who blithely phoned a Supreme Court justice to resolve a reader's question about who owned the nuts that fell from a tree into a neighbor's yard.
Dussault works the audience, taking polls on such weighty questions as the correct way to hang toilet paper. Questions of sex loom large, and the actress perfectly captures Landers' mix of old-fashioned propriety and modern frankness. (She tosses off enough folksy Midwestern metaphors to fill Lake Wobegon.)
Arizona Theatre Company's production is superb, particularly the scenic design by Tom Burch. The floor-to-ceiling living-room set is exquisitely detailed but not too showy. Ann Landers, no question, would approve.
Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

Author: Kerry Lengel
Source: The Arizona Republic