Holland Taylor On ‘N/A’ And Playing Powerful Women
Holland Taylor plays a thinly veiled Nancy Pelosi in 'N/A.' Along with a judge on 'The Practice,' a network exec on 'The Morning Show' and Charlie Sheen's mom on 'Two And A Half Men,' it's the latest in string of strong women she's played.
The title of N/A—the slight but sprightly two-hander that Congressional aide-turned-playwright Mario Correa has concocted out of thin D.C. air and director Diane Paulus has delivered to Off-Broadway’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater—is very shorthand for Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress.
These two Congresswomen are never named (or initialed, for that matter), and the verbal exchanges that pass between them are entirely imagined (though completely convincing). Still, the models are clear, the time frame runs from the 2018 midterms (when AOC was elected) to the 2022 midterms (when Pelosi ended her time as Speaker of the House), and the parts are cast so perfectly it all plays as real.
The temptation is great to say Pelosi is Taylor-made for Holland Taylor since it’s hard to imagine anyone—anyone—who better embodies N’s special brand of power, class, humor and dignity. Similarly, Ana Villafañe (who got a Theatre World Award for playing Gloria Esteban in 2015’s On Your Feet) is very much a ringer for Ocasio-Cortez, Beso red lipstick and all. In 80 minutes—five scenes spanning four years—they do their ideological head-butting in Pelosi’s office.
When Taylor got her first whiff of this script, she was on the mend from shoulder surgery. “I didn’t know if I should do a play or not,” she tells Observer. “That’s when they told me they were sending me the script. I didn’t even finish reading it before I called up my agent and said, ‘Tell them yes. Tell them I want to do it as quickly as possible.’”
Because of her surgery, she was corseted in a very comely, pink bodysuit top. “The battery packs are right on my ribcage,” she says. “I’m all trussed up in that thing, but I’m used to performing high-stress situations in, you know, wigs, bodysuits and God knows what else. I just tone it up.”
Her on-stage sparring partner has been a big help. “Ana is remarkable,” Taylor says. “She’s very different from me as a performer, and we enjoy our differences because it leads to something that completes the picture. She has an intellectual understanding of the dynamic of these two better than me. She sees the whole picture.”
The “enemy” is the legalistic language they’re required to fling blithely about the stage. “We’re both sub-talents by the nature of this dialogue,” Taylor admits. “It’s all mental and intellectual. In a way, it’s abstract, and yet there’s a lot of passion involved. But it’s not girl-speak. It’s not the vernacular. It’s not human conversation. It’s full of ideas and mental challenges. I was very late being off-book, which I never am—as in never—but wow: this was something! In this past month, both of us have really got it integrated in our systems. I remember once coming off stage and saying to her, ‘I actually enjoyed that,’ and she told me, ‘So did I!’ Finally, we’re playing!”
Director Paulus, who staged 1776 with an all-female cast, maneuvers this Democratic duo smartly and swiftly through key historical moments. Taylor, being the go-to gal for the acerbic quip or the deadpan insult, starts off with a full round of zingers that put the upstart newcomer in her place. She has been at it so long, Jesse Green suggested in his Times review, her technique has dissolved: “She no longer seems to be delivering the lines but letting them deliver her.”
Taylor established her Broadway beachhead 41 years ago in a roundabout way, first by co-starring with Keith Charles in Breakfast with Les and Bess, an amiable little comedy about a celebrity couple who ran a radio morning show out of their apartment. It was a big success Off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild and kept getting held over month after month. “Our pay to do that play was, basically, car fare—$35 a week,” Taylor remembers. “I was eating at Joe Allen on the tab.”
But then came a Broadway role, with a few hitches. “I got this offer to take over for Eve Arden in Moose Murders—with a week’s notice—basically, just to get it to opening night. I knew it’d close quickly, so I wouldn’t have to do it for a long time.”
It would turn out to be one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history, so joining the cast on short notice brought its advantages. “The cast members who had gone through the anguish of the rehearsal period were so beaten down and upset and confused,” Taylor says. “The director was the boyfriend of the producer’s daughter, and he didn’t know what to do. It was a shambles. It was like being in a farm house and having the house just literally fall into timber all around you.”
Down it came, but it didn’t take Taylor with it. She emerged better off than before. “I got a Broadway salary for a couple of weeks and went back to work, transferring Les and Bess further uptown to the Lamb’s Club.”
Twenty years passed before Taylor ventured back to Broadway, and this time she wrote her own ticket—Ann: An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards, a 2013 solo show saluting the Texas governor. It earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress. “I researched that play for two long years before I started writing it,” she says. “People sometimes think that I created Ann to give myself a job when nothing could be farther from the truth. If I were going to create a one-woman show, I would have done it before I was 70. It’s not funny at that age to do something on the New York stage. This particular show was two hours, and there was only one pause in the entire play.”
When Richards died in 2006 Taylor found she couldn’t stop thinking about her. “I couldn’t even understand why,” she says. “I met her a few times, but I didn’t know her.” But then a few months after her death Taylor was struck by the idea of a play about Richards (“not a movie of the week or some such thing”) and when she began work on it she was on fire. “I was writing not about a politician and not about anything to do with politics, really. I was writing about the essence of this purpose-driven woman because there was something about her persona that inspired people at a profound level. She was just the be-all and end-all for a lot of people. I wanted to capture that because I thought that some of that inspiration, which she always produced whenever she went, would come across in the play—and I think that it did.”
Meanwhile, her current project—N/A—winds down at the Newhouse on September 1. Taylor believes the show has now entered its best phase: “We’re starting to get diverse audiences,” she says. “It feels like we’re really communicating with a large swath of people.”
Once the run is through, she returns to the West Coast where in mid-September she and a co-star on The Morning Show, Nicole Beharie, are Emmy-contending for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Taylor plays Cybil Richards, a television exec so far up the corporate ladder she could get nosebleeds, and this crucial episode with Beharie may be the last we ever see of her.
“Cybil is the sort of standard character that I would be offered,” she explained. “She is patrician, she is very powerful, and she’s passionate about the network she owns—very much a legacy person. Why it got really interesting was that they decided to have her get caught in a racially insensitive faux pas and have it exposed by an on-air reporter at her station”—that would be Beharie—“a new hire and a Black woman. It’s blown up into a scandalous story that is wildly out of proportion to what was actually said. The Black reporter asks Cybil to explain her remarks on air. Beharie, who’s a marvelous actress, is coming on like Spartacus into the ring, and Cybil is petrified she will make another misstep. That was the scene. It was electrifying, and it was electrifying for us to do.”
Taylor has won in an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, before, in 1999 for her role as Judge Roberta Kittleson on The Practice (a one-time appearance that proved so powerful it reoccured across five years and 29 episodes). Then there are her five Emmy noms for her roles as the overbearing mom of Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer on Two and a Half Men. Authoritarian females—whether they’re Speaker of the House, governor, judge, network exec or mom—have always been a specialty for Holland Taylor, who has also specialized in finding ways to make them moving, human and accessible.