The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

‘Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins’: My Q. & A. with playwright Margaret Engel

A black mon­grel dog scam­pers across the stage, “drag­ging a leash and a canoe paddle.”

Her owner yells for the dog by her proper name, “Shit”—an ever-handy exple­tive for a Texas oilman’s red-headed daugh­ter, grouchy about the sta­tus quo.

This is the pop­ulist jour­nal­ist Molly Ivins at home, in a new play by Mar­garet (Peggy) Engel and her sis­ter, Alli­son. With the bless­ing of the Ivins estate, the twins have deftly stitched together an Ivins solil­o­quy from her actual writings.

Ivins wrote best-selling books and syn­di­cated columns and fired up hun­dreds of young reporters, only to die of breast can­cer in 2007 at 62. But if Kath­leen Turner’s act­ing is as good as the script I read the other day, even Molly’s bare­foot ghost might have to double-check the death certificate.

The play’s debut, March 19 through April 18, is in Philadel­phia. Ahead is an edited email inter­view with Peggy Engel (right in photo by Mark Berndt), for­mer Wash­ing­ton Post reporter, ex-managing edi­tor of the New­seum and long-time direc­tor of the Ali­cia Pat­ter­son Foun­da­tion. Peggy and I have been friends for decades, start­ing with her first news­pa­per job in Lorain, Ohio, near Cleve­land. Peggy now lives in Bethesda, Mary­land; Alli­son, in Los Ange­les, where she is direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern California.

Q. Tell us more about who Molly was. Which other writer, dead or alive, was she most like in her humor and some other respects? Admir­ers say Ambrose Bierce or even Mark Twain.

She was hilar­i­ously funny. She was so smart and her wit just sparkled. She was a com­bi­na­tion of Bierce and Twain and Will Rogers, with some of that caus­tic humor that Ann Richards possessed.

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