Review: This 'Lady' takes crises with a grain of salt

We know a few things about Ann Landers. But how much do we know about Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer -- the woman who drove that tank for nearly 50 years?

Getting beyond journalism is always the challenge of biographical theater, and it is no less the case in "The Lady With All the Answers," a modestly ambitious piece by David Rambo that opened over the weekend at History Theatre in St. Paul. Rambo uses the twin pillars of historical record and Ann Landers' letters -- goofy, weird, poignant -- to satisfy the audience's itch for entertainment.

But it is actor Cathleen Fuller who uses Rambo's words to give us a flesh-and-blood glimpse of how a woman with no journalistic experience or training could become one of the most-widely read newspaper columnists of her generation. A political animal with a wicked sense of humor, blessed with resilient energy and ego, ordinary common sense, confidence and self-deprecating humility, Lederer possessed an uncanny capacity to shoulder crises -- whether her readers' or her own. She was extremely unsentimental yet read hundreds of letters every day and made a stab at solving the world's problems.

The facts are what they always have been. Lederer was born 17 minutes before her twin, who would become her bitter rival "Dear Abby." Eppie, as the older sister was known, married Jules Lederer in Sioux City, Iowa, and shortly moved to Eau Claire, Wis. She, Jules and daughter, Margo, moved in 1955 to Chicago, where she won a contest and started dishing out advice as Ann Landers.

Rambo uses the standard solo-show trick of placing his subject at the point of emotional crisis. In 1975, Landers mulled the difficult column in which she would tell readers that her 35-year marriage was over. If we take this show on its own terms, Landers is nearly impervious to this disaster, cracking wise with salty one-liners, cheerily bouncing through stacks of letters and offering advice that endures today in vacuous clichés. "Two pickles shy of a sandwich," she judges one letter writer.

Fuller slouches her shoulders into the character, hair swept into a helmet and voice tuned to an almost im-PAHS-ibly flat Midwestern drone. With director Suzy Messerole as her guide, Fuller gets inside the contradictions that rested easily in Lederer's soul. Liberal on abortion, gay rights, the Vietnam War, Landers was every bit as square as an 8th-grade English teacher chaperoning the junior-high dance. She didn't smoke or drink and railed against drug use.

Strange cat, that Ann Landers. Strange but interesting.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299