Lisa Hodsoll (Chelsea Bland)
Did Laura Bush kill a guy? A one-woman show from theater collective The Klunch may not definitively answer that question, but it still makes for an entertaining evening.
First ladies occupy a strange spot in political discourse. They don’t have any official power, but they exist in its orbit, so their stories can be even more prone to myth and hyperbole than those of their husbands. Reviled and revered largely by association, their legacies can be tricky. The Klunch examines this dynamic in Laura Bush Killed a Guy.
Bush (Lisa Hodsoll) is a good choice for this examination. She seemed to fly under the radar even during her tenure as First Lady, and her husband has been back in the news thanks to a press desperate for Republican voices critical of Donald Trump. Ian Allen’s script settles on a comedic account of Bush’s life and first ladyship based on real events—even if the events are sometimes exaggerated for effect.
Hodsoll carries this one-woman show exactly where it needs to go and well beyond. She conveys just the right amount of Bush’s straightforward charm to be believable, but uses it seamlessly towards the show’s absurd ends when needed, never once breaking her exuberant and attentive character as she describes all manner of bizarre happenings that (probably) did and (maybe) did not happen in the Bush White House.
Even some of the drier jokes feel more raucous in the mouth of Hobson’s disarmingly friendly first lady. It helps that she’s describing an administration in which the president really referred to Karl Rove as Turd Blossom but the bulk of the comic success still belongs primarily to Hodsoll’s performance.
As for whether she really killed a guy, it’s not that simple. The play dances around its title, giving it a multiple-choice history that frames it in contradictory lights. Meanwhile, Bush’s tone ebbs and flows wildly over the course of the show, ranging from unsettling Stepford Wife blatantly unaware of the impact of her husband’s actions to sympathetic country girl recounting in detail her emotional reaction to 9/11.
It can be jarring, but eventually its cleverness takes shape. Hodsoll isn’t playing Laura Bush exactly, she’s playing our collective image of Laura Bush, reflected and filtered through our imperfect memory and often deliberately skewed visions of her. She is simultaneously the charming, understated Texas belle of the right and the ignorant child of unrestrained privilege of the left, and she flits between these roles at will because those are the only roles most Americas ever considered for her.
You may not get a better picture of Laura Bush after seeing Laura Bush Killed a Guy, but you’ll laugh, gain insight into how we all see her, and maybe nosh on some of her famous Cowboy Cookies in the lobby beforehand.
Laura Bush Killed a Guy is at Caos on F through June 4th. Buy tickets here:
