It may seem like a mistake, in a play about Ann Richards—the second female governor of Texas, and the last Democrat to hold the office—to dispense with her most famous quote in the first few seconds of Act I. You know the one, delivered by Richards at the 1988 Democratic National Convention: “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

But there’s much more to come. The one-woman show Ann—written by TV’s Holland Taylor, who earned a Tony nomination when she played the role on Broadway—is loaded up with one-liners that kill. Richards, here played by Jayne Atkinson, spouts off platitudes that fit somewhere between the folksy lyricism of Kacey Musgraves (of her childhood: “I grew up back in Lakeview, where there was no lake to view”) and the venom-soaked insults of Veep’s Selina Meyer (of a troublesome fellow politician: “He couldn’t organize a circle jerk”).

Ann’s framing device—a graduation address given at a fictional Texas university—affords Richards plenty of opportunities to toss off these T-shirt-worthy quotes as she tells her own story, from her early days organizing campaigns, to her single term in the Texas governor’s office before being succeeded by George W. Bush in 1994, to her time in New York advising at a public relations firm.

This is a one-woman show, after all. It lives and dies on the performance of Atkinson, an actress who, after stints on House of Cards and Madam Secretary, knows her way around a fake politician’s digs. She’s got the hair and the sensible pumps, yes, but she’s also nailed Richards’ Texas drawl, somehow both musical and laden with bone-dry sarcasm.

Atkinson steers the audience around some hairpin turns in the script’s tone, transitioning from relating her struggle with alcoholism, to telling an off-color joke about a Great Dane. She is at her best when she uses all of the space in the simple set, bracing herself like a linebacker (because “Texas politics is a contact sport”) or twirling as she pantomimes a memorable Halloween costume.

But she delivers some of the passages from behind a lectern, and those less spirited sections—about the end of her marriage and her dissatisfaction with being a housewife, for example—feel as though they’re being read aloud from a memoir.

The show is at its best when it’s showing Richards in her element. An extended middle segment set in her gubernatorial office in 1993 sees the official giving a masterclass in multitasking. In a series of phone calls, she ping-pongs from strong-arming President Bill Clinton into expanding a local program, weighing a controversial death penalty case, making plans to buy boots for her staff while on a pitstop in El Paso, and negotiating charades teams for the family vacation.

Richards had a long life, and a fair amount of it is left on the cutting room floor. But detailing her accomplishments isn’t the point: Atkinson’s Richards is someone you want to spend an evening with, and Ann certainly delivers on that.

Ann runs at Arena Stage through August 11, tickets $56-$115. Runtime one hour and 35 minutes with one intermission.