The Lady With All the Answers presents the columnist Ann Landers as a person who just might write a letter to herself. Her faith in herself and her work is unquestioned, even as her own life takes a bump or two. Well, really, only one bump.

The Lady With All the Answers by David Rambo. Directed by Howard J. Millman. Staged by the Peterborough Players at the Peterborough Players Theatre, Peterborough, New Hampshire, through September 25.

By Jim Kates

Carolyn Michel as Eppie Lederer (a.k.a Ann Landers). Photo: Florida Repertory Theatre

When we were young, our local newspaper carried the Ann Landers advice column. We read it the way we read the comics, for giggles and guffaws, from a distance. We couldn’t imagine who might actually write such letters or read the advice dispensed.

The Lady With All the Answers presents the columnist herself as a person who just might write a letter to Ann Landers. Her faith in herself and her work is unquestioned, even as her own life takes a bump or two. Well, really, only one bump. The entire play takes place in the wake of her husband of 36 years having betrayed her with a younger woman (“Throw the bum out!”) and her decision to divorce him. (“Wake up and smell the coffee!”) Nothing else except the state of the world and a touch of sibling rivalry seems to have disturbed her smooth course. As David Rambo’s play was written with the official cooperation of its protagonist’s daughter, we should expect no less, and no more.

I am prejudiced against one-person bio-dramas. To begin with, the biography tends to take the place of real theatrical action. There is a conventional progress of narrative from light-hearted banter in the first act, a rather artificial dramatic dilemma to organize the life around, a touch of high seriousness in the second act, and a redemptive conclusion, often very swiftly tacked on. Here, the dilemma is remarkably undramatic: how will Ann Landers write to her readers about her own domestic difficulties. How will the “lady with all the answers” admit that she has no answer? Will it destroy her career? (Of course, we already know it didn’t.)

This has about as much urgency as my having just dropped a pistachio nut on the floor while I write these lines. Writing is, as every writer knows, a supremely undramatic act.

Reader, she finishes the column.

Before she does, the audience, addressed directly with some back and forth, hears an awful lot about toilet paper and sex, a little about liberal politics of the 1950s through the 1970s, “all the problems and questions of life.” This is just what we read her column for so many years ago. It’s about someone else; it doesn’t reach inside us.

But now here’s the good part: Carolyn Michel pulls this off more than nicely. She begins bright and sprightly with a hen-like darting around the stage that captures the character’s own description of herself as “effervescent and fun-loving.” She reels off the necessary biographical material of birth and childhood, courtship and professional life, as if she were in genuine conversation with an ignorant and interested listener. She is superb in her timing and clever with the double-take, those comedic necessities. She makes the transition to her moments of high seriousness—most notably a trip to the troops in Vietnam—without jarring.

Carolyn Michel as Ann Landers is superb in her timing and clever with the double take. Photo: Florida Repertory Theatre

Director Howard J. Millman keeps her in constant motion around Charles Morgan’s realistic set of a Lake Shore Drive apartment until we think that the only thing keeping her from finishing her column is her inability to sit still.

It is a pleasure to watch Michel work. These one-person shows I have such personal trouble with are grueling for the actor who keeps one going. To be able to pull one off from beginning to end, although we might take it for granted that this is simply what an actor does, is no mean feat. And, from beginning to end, Michel makes Ann Landers come alive.

I just wish that behind the liveliness there was more depth of living in the character Michel brings so vividly into our lives. Kudos for Millman and Michel, but a few lashes with a wet noodle (a fitting emblem of the play) for the playwright David Rambo.

(This review is written simultaneously for the Keene (New Hampshire) Sentinel and artsfuse.org.)